Okay kiddo, back in the olden days, in the 1940s during World War II, the British needed a way to break secret codes that their enemies were sending in messages. They asked a clever man named Alan Turing to make a machine to help them with this problem.
And boy, did he deliver! Turing designed a big computer machine called Colossus. It was as big as a room and had lots of parts, like tubes and switches, that worked together to solve the code puzzles.
Colossus could read the secret messages and find the hidden patterns in them. Then it could tell the humans working with it what the message said. This was super helpful for the British military, because it gave them an advantage in the war.
So, to sum up, Colossus was a really big and smart machine that helped British soldiers decode enemy messages during World War II. It made a big difference in how the war was fought and won!