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 ...

We think of punched cards as old-fashioned, but still squarely part of the computer age. Turns out, cards were in use way before they got conscripted by computers. Jacquard looms are one famous ...

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 ...