The Jacquard loom*, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801, was one of the first machines to use punched cards -- making the loom an often cited processor/influence in many narratives of the history of computer hardware and computer programming. Demonstrated in the above video, the loom allowed textile designers to "program" a sequence of mechanical movements via the punched card; the designed punched card could then be feed into the Jacquard loom to be read and executed.
Punched Cards
The loom operated on the basis of the same binary (yes/no, on/off) logic that remains fundamental to computers today, and with enough binary input the loom was capable of outputting a surprisingly complex range of patterns. If the textile designer wanted to change the output pattern, all they needed to do was feed the loom a new punched card (i.e., punched card as software and loom as hardware).
What is striking to me about the Jacquard loom as compared with the standardized testing machines of the 20th century is the differences of their outputs.
The Jacquard loom read punched cards that were designed -- with a specific visual/material output pattern in mind -- in order to produce a textile such as a rug:
And standardized testing machines (and voting machines), by the same basic technical processes, read bubble sheets that are designed -- presumably without any pattern in mind -- in order to produce data visualizations such as bar graphs:
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