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It's an interesting idea but I don't think it holds up. The earliest tabulators didn't use punch cards to store "programs" but to encode data, and the mechanica

It's an interesting idea but I don't think it holds up. The earliest tabulators didn't use punch cards to store "programs" but to encode data, and the mechanical work of punching data into cards, then processing those cards, was fairly rote. "Programming" those machines meant rewiring, as it did for quite a few generations of technology. So while the card handling was certainly done by both men and women [0], I think it's a stretch to suppose it bridged weaving and later (stored program) programming. Others here will probably have personal memories of the late mainframe era, but my understanding is that even then writing code and punching it on to cards were not necessarily done by the same person, with code first written out long hand on special forms then punched by a specialist. [1] [0] First, at scale, in the 1890 US census. I just published a book with a chapter on this: http://www.thesumofthepeople.com http://www.thesumofthepeople.com [1] e.g. as described here https://code.likeagirl.io/the-first-program-i-ever-wrote-5a5a6b08469c https://code.likeagirl.io/the-first-program-i-ever-wrote-5a5...

yowlingcat 6y ago
> I don't think it holds up. Could you clarify where it doesn't hold up? The biggest issue I can think of with the loom as computer analogy is reusing previous work. Perhaps what you are describing about the boundary between the cards and the data (at least for a loom) is that you can't write data out the cards and then read it back in again. But even here, I'm not exactly sure that's theoretically watertight. Suppose you had a seed set of cards that formed a chain. Based on that you weaved fabric which had strategically placed holes such that they could function like a card. Given that you can now write output in the same format you read input, does this mean you could use a Jacquard Loom as a Turing Machine (never mind whether someone would do such a harebrained idea)? And of course, just because you maybe could doesn't mean that anyone bothered, in large part for the reasons that the inventor of the tabulator machine chose to use punch cards (rather than fabric) in the first place! That machine you reference does seem to be the first machine that can both write and read to its input medium, the punch card, and from there, I suppose, it is history. Still, I'm convinced that there's something very interesting and maybe core to computation embedded in humanity's usage of the loom and in fabric itself. We can earnestly consider it a predecessor to the printing press (and tabulating machines) in how it provided technology to store and preserve bytes of data (representing bitmapped images) in fabric. This is another grasp in the dark, but it almost reminds me a little bit of the FFT.
- Animats 6y ago
  That machine you reference does seem to be the first machine that can both write and read to its input medium, the punch card, and from there, I suppose, it is history. Machines that could both read and punch cards in a programmable way were fairly rare. Keypunches could make a copy of a card, and even copy only selected fields, but that was about it. IBM built devices that could read a card, multiply, and punch the result in the same card. (Also see the McClure Multiplying Punch, a mechanical monstrosity from Powers-Samas in England. This could not only multiply, it could so in pounds, shillings, and pence.) As I've pointed out before, the early history of computing was a long, hard slog trying to make a storage device. Mechanical arithmetic was old; Pascal built a mechanical adder in 1645 (!) and Leibniz built a mechanical multiplier in 1694. IBM had an electronic multiplier in R&D before WWII. But the first computing machine with significant memory (a delay line) was built around 1947. It was clear by the late 1930s that cheap, fast memory would make computing a lot easier, but cheap DRAM was many decades away.

yowlingcat 6y ago

> I don't think it holds up. Could you clarify where it doesn't hold up? The biggest issue I can think of with the loom as computer analogy is reusing previous work. Perhaps what you are describing about the boundary between the cards and the data (at least for a loom) is that you can't write data out the cards and then read it back in again. But even here, I'm not exactly sure that's theoretically watertight. Suppose you had a seed set of cards that formed a chain. Based on that you weaved fabric which had strategically placed holes such that they could function like a card. Given that you can now write output in the same format you read input, does this mean you could use a Jacquard Loom as a Turing Machine (never mind whether someone would do such a harebrained idea)? And of course, just because you maybe could doesn't mean that anyone bothered, in large part for the reasons that the inventor of the tabulator machine chose to use punch cards (rather than fabric) in the first place! That machine you reference does seem to be the first machine that can both write and read to its input medium, the punch card, and from there, I suppose, it is history. Still, I'm convinced that there's something very interesting and maybe core to computation embedded in humanity's usage of the loom and in fabric itself. We can earnestly consider it a predecessor to the printing press (and tabulating machines) in how it provided technology to store and preserve bytes of data (representing bitmapped images) in fabric. This is another grasp in the dark, but it almost reminds me a little bit of the FFT.

Animats 6y ago
That machine you reference does seem to be the first machine that can both write and read to its input medium, the punch card, and from there, I suppose, it is history. Machines that could both read and punch cards in a programmable way were fairly rare. Keypunches could make a copy of a card, and even copy only selected fields, but that was about it. IBM built devices that could read a card, multiply, and punch the result in the same card. (Also see the McClure Multiplying Punch, a mechanical monstrosity from Powers-Samas in England. This could not only multiply, it could so in pounds, shillings, and pence.) As I've pointed out before, the early history of computing was a long, hard slog trying to make a storage device. Mechanical arithmetic was old; Pascal built a mechanical adder in 1645 (!) and Leibniz built a mechanical multiplier in 1694. IBM had an electronic multiplier in R&D before WWII. But the first computing machine with significant memory (a delay line) was built around 1947. It was clear by the late 1930s that cheap, fast memory would make computing a lot easier, but cheap DRAM was many decades away.