For Opensauce '24 I modified a Leclerc Dorothy Table Loom to be a Jaquard. With exception of some bearings and rods it was entirely 3D printed. It could run real punch cards (that I cheated and used a laser cutter to make, I wasn't building a second machine to punch the cards. Although that machine is super cool on it's own.) I had found a book that detailed extremely well the mechanisms used in the machine. It surprisingly worked very well with not terribly much trial and error. Even surviving being in my luggage from Maryland to SF. A surprising number of people were super excited to get to see one up close and really see how they had operated. So many people came up to tell me they had been to so and so museum where they had one, but it was a giant machine you couldn't really look at up close.
Currently I'm down the rabbit hole of leavers lace machines, they make Jaquard looms look like child's toys. But they were much less common, and I don't think any exist in the united states. If anyone has any leads or information on someone that works on or with or near or has heard of one of these machines please let me know.
flint
I worked on an early spreadsheet and word-processing system at Lehman Brothers back in about 1984. The system was called Jacquard.
The investment bankers built comparative financials in this system and printed them out on 14x11 folded paper.
The deal was that you could enter formulas into a bar, with a formula for each column, and drag the bar down to apply the formula to the cells.
show comments
atulatul
This related BBC QI video is quite interesting: Which Software Drove People To Violence?
It's been a while since I read it, but I enjoyed _Jacquard's Web_ by James Essinger, which covers this in some more depth
112233
I'm baffled by the persistent notion that Jacquard's loom is somehow related to computing. There is no computation. It is not remotely the first punchcard-driven loom. Extremely complex musical and animated automata existed long prior. E.g. the Banu Musa automatic flute player.
The article quotes the reason being "inspired by" that loom. uh...
show comments
Atlas667
By chance I was reading about this yesterday, only in the context of unemployment.
In Das Kapital, Section 5: The Strife Between Workman and Machine, Marx talks about how the automatic looms caused some of the very first waves of mass unemployment under nascent capitalism.
He tells how in some German states they banned the use of looms, burned them, some say even drowned or strangled their creators. Both the state and the textile workers did this in order to preserve order.
Later, states allowed them but the textile workers formed sabotage units in order to destroy machines and keep their jobs.
At the end it ends with this: "It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production (the machine), but against the mode in which they are used."
Very relevant in the face of progress, especially of AI.
Ps: and a quick reminder that communism is about developing production for human needs not profits. The ills of unemployment would be unnecessary with added efficiency.
For Opensauce '24 I modified a Leclerc Dorothy Table Loom to be a Jaquard. With exception of some bearings and rods it was entirely 3D printed. It could run real punch cards (that I cheated and used a laser cutter to make, I wasn't building a second machine to punch the cards. Although that machine is super cool on it's own.) I had found a book that detailed extremely well the mechanisms used in the machine. It surprisingly worked very well with not terribly much trial and error. Even surviving being in my luggage from Maryland to SF. A surprising number of people were super excited to get to see one up close and really see how they had operated. So many people came up to tell me they had been to so and so museum where they had one, but it was a giant machine you couldn't really look at up close.
Currently I'm down the rabbit hole of leavers lace machines, they make Jaquard looms look like child's toys. But they were much less common, and I don't think any exist in the united states. If anyone has any leads or information on someone that works on or with or near or has heard of one of these machines please let me know.
I worked on an early spreadsheet and word-processing system at Lehman Brothers back in about 1984. The system was called Jacquard. The investment bankers built comparative financials in this system and printed them out on 14x11 folded paper. The deal was that you could enter formulas into a bar, with a formula for each column, and drag the bar down to apply the formula to the cells.
This related BBC QI video is quite interesting: Which Software Drove People To Violence?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7r1GnG9cQ8
James Burke's series Connections has a great episode on computation that covers the loom.
https://youtu.be/z6yL0_sDnX0?si=-xdIgEj_kk9QIDPq
Here is a video that explains better how it works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6NgMNvK52A
The history of how we go from a loom ca. 1725 to 80x25 terminals ca. 2026 is fascinating. It's been written up many times, here's my take:
https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
It's been a while since I read it, but I enjoyed _Jacquard's Web_ by James Essinger, which covers this in some more depth
I'm baffled by the persistent notion that Jacquard's loom is somehow related to computing. There is no computation. It is not remotely the first punchcard-driven loom. Extremely complex musical and animated automata existed long prior. E.g. the Banu Musa automatic flute player.
The article quotes the reason being "inspired by" that loom. uh...
By chance I was reading about this yesterday, only in the context of unemployment.
In Das Kapital, Section 5: The Strife Between Workman and Machine, Marx talks about how the automatic looms caused some of the very first waves of mass unemployment under nascent capitalism.
He tells how in some German states they banned the use of looms, burned them, some say even drowned or strangled their creators. Both the state and the textile workers did this in order to preserve order.
Later, states allowed them but the textile workers formed sabotage units in order to destroy machines and keep their jobs.
At the end it ends with this: "It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production (the machine), but against the mode in which they are used."
Very relevant in the face of progress, especially of AI.
Ps: and a quick reminder that communism is about developing production for human needs not profits. The ills of unemployment would be unnecessary with added efficiency.
Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm...