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 ...

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 ...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osCPWMyJOj8&w=470] The Jacquard loom, invented in the early 1800s, used punched cards to manufacture relatively complex ...

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 ...

Before IBM, before punch-card computers, before Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, one of the very first machines that could run something like what we now call a "program" was used to make fabric.

WHO invented computer memory? Received wisdom has it that it was Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the Frenchman whose system of punched cards automated silk-weaving looms in the early 19th century. Not so, says ...