... them to 'surf' the web, communicate with other people, organise their finance or play games. 2. Wartime Computers At the outset of World War Two computers, by today's standard, were still very simple and could easily fill a room. They had not been converted into digital form, instead remaining in analogue form. One of the first electronic computers ever built was the Colossus; it was designed by Alan Turing in 1943 and was created to break the codes of the German army and the Lorenz Cipher. Being so big that it would occupy a large room the Colossus worked by reading 5,000 teleprinter characters per second from a paper tape. It analysed them by seeing how often a Boolean function between the characters and the wheel patterns gave a true or false result. The components that made the Colossus function included an optical reader system, a master control panel, the thyratron rings and ...

See this essay or coursework document in full right now