Trail4 steps

From looms to laptops

How punched cards for weaving silk became the foundation of computing.

This chain runs from silk to software in four steps. Each step is a person or machine that took an idea from somewhere unexpected and moved it into a new field.

Start the trail →

I
It starts in Lyon, with a loom that reads instructions from cards.
No. 064ObjectInventions
Computers began as looms The first machine controlled by punched cards was not a calculator. It wove silk.
II
Charles Babbage saw those cards and realised they could control calculation as well as thread.
No. 004ObjectTechnology
The computer that was designed in 1837 Charles Babbage designed a steam-age machine with memory, a processor and punched-card programs, then never finished building it.
III
Ada Lovelace understood what Babbage’s machine meant better than anyone, perhaps better than Babbage himself.
No. 001PersonTechnology
The first computer programmer was a poet’s daughter In 1843, a century before electronic computers, Ada Lovelace wrote out a program and imagined machines making music.
IV
A century later the machines were real, and so were their problems.
No. 030StoryTechnology
The first computer bug was an actual bug In 1947 engineers found a moth stuck in a computer and taped it into the logbook. The word “bug” was already older than that.