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 ...

Developed by the French silk-weaver, Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834), to control its operation, the loom used a chain of cards punched with holes in a continuous loop. Although punch cards were ...

The ability to store information has evolved from punch-card looms to modern smartphones. Every technological advancement has relied on defining states—on or off, high or low, pit or land—to ...

From punch card-operated looms in the 1800s to modern cellphones, if an object has an "on" and an "off" state, it can be used to store information. In a computer laptop, the binary ones and zeroes are ...

Joseph-Marie Jacquard invents an automatic loom controlled by punch cards. Charles Babbage conceives of a "Difference Engine" in 1820 or 1821. It is a massive steam-powered mechanical calculator ...

(1) See loyalty punch card. (2) An early storage medium made of thin cardboard stock that held data as patterns of punched holes. Also called "punched" cards, each of the 80 or 96 columns held one ...

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 ...