IngentaConnect Mistaken Ancestry: The Jacquard and the Computer

Authors: Davis, Martin; Davis, Virginia

Source: Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Volume 3, Number 1, January 2005 , pp. 76-87(12)

Abstract:

The punched-card-driven loom introduced by Joseph-Marie Jacquard in the early years of the nineteenth century was the culmination of a number of efforts to mechanize the tedious work of manipulating the separate threads in a draw loom. The data constituting the desired pattern were introduced to the loom via a set of cards with punched holes. Noting the use of punched cards with the computers of the 1960s and also the fact that the intrinsic binary nature of weaving (a given thread is either "up" or "down") is shared by the binary circuitry of computers, weavers have been heard to claim that the Jacquard loom is the ancestor of the modern computer. This idea is the result of a profound misconception about the nature of computers. A Jacquard loom is no more like a computer than is a player piano, which also used punched holes as an input device. For a computer, the role of punched cards was only to provide a mechanism for enabling it to receive the data it needs to accomplish the significant and revolutionary aspects of its functioning, namely to carry out the sequential steps of any processing of its data whatever, so long as these are spelled out with utter precision and subject only to limitations of space and time. The use of binary logic in computer circuitry is a great simplifying tool, deriving from the work of mathematicians such as Leibniz and Boole, but is by no means an essential aspect of the nature of computers.

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