This portrait was woven using a Jacquard loom.
Before IBM, before punch-card computers, before Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, one of the very first machines that could run something like what we now call a “program” was used to make fabric. The machine was a loom and could process so much information that the fabric it produced could display pictures detailed enough that they might be mistaken for engravings.
Continue reading… “Before we had computers, people programmed looms”
