Jacquard A loom, a punch card, your name

Since 1804

Weave your name.

Every letter becomes eight bits. Every bit lifts a thread. Watch your name woven into damask on the loom that taught machines to follow a program.

Punch card — / —

Where code comes from

The first program was a pattern.

  1. 1804

    The Jacquard loom

    Joseph Marie Jacquard patents a loom driven by a chain of punched cards. A hole lifts a thread, no hole leaves it down, and a sequence of cards weaves any pattern, again and again.

  2. 1843

    Ada Lovelace

    Writing about Babbage's Analytical Engine, which was to read its instructions from Jacquard-style cards, Lovelace notes that it “weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

  3. 1890

    Hollerith's tabulator

    Herman Hollerith's punched-card machines count the United States census. His company later becomes part of IBM, and punch cards run computing for most of the next century.

  4. Now

    Your cloth

    Your name is turned into bytes, the bytes into a punch card, and the card into a damask: a warp-faced satin figure on a weft-faced ground, mirrored like a textile repeat. Built by a textile designer who became a software engineer.