We think of punched cards as old-fashioned, but still squarely part of the computer age. Turns out, cards were in use way before they got conscripted by computers. Jacquard looms are one famous ...

Punch cards have been used to control the operation of machinery from the early nineteenth century, when the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard patented an attachment to a loom in which a series of ...

An automated loom that transformed the 19th century textile industry and became the inspiration for future data processing machines. Developed by the French silk-weaver, Joseph-Marie Jacquard ...

The punch card, the first way to program a machine, turned 300 this year. The first semi-automatic loom was created in Lyon as early as 1725. To commemorate this, we have taken the liberty of updating ...

If you mention punch cards to most people, they’ll think of voting. If you mention it to most older computer people, they’ll think of punching programs for big computers on cards. But punched cards ...