Modern computers are almost all-rounders in modern life, capable of calculating complex formulas, presenting beautiful images, and playing chess with people. But did you know that the braiding machine also played a big role in the evolution of the computer?

  One thing in the heart of the modern computer is:

  To make machines listen to human and compute according to their wishes, it is necessary to realize the dialogue between humans and machines, or in other word, to translate human thought to machines, so that the machine can perform automatically according human will.

In order to accomplish this, people came up with such a thing as programming, and the first programming was done on braiding machine.

  Before the 18th century, people were quite fussy about weaving patterns. All silk fabrics were woven with warp (vertical threads) and weft (horizontal threads). To create a pattern, weavers had to carefully follow a pre-designed pattern, “lifting” a portion of the warp threads in the right place to allow the sliding shuttle to pull the different colored weft threads through. Of course, the machine cannot “figure out” where to lift the threats by itself, so the weaver has to “lift” one wrap thread after another by hand, repeating this operation endlessly.

  It wasn't until 1725 that the French textile mechanic B. Bouchon came up with the brilliant idea of “perforated paper tape”. Bouchon first managed to use a row of knitting needles to control the movement of all the warp threads, and then take a roll of paper tape, according to the pattern of a row of small holes, and press it on the knitting needle. When the machine is started, the knitting needles that are directly in front of the holes go through and hook the warp threads, while the other needles are blocked from moving by the paper tape. In this way, the knitting needles automatically pick up the warp threads according to the pre-designed pattern, and the “thoughts” of the Bucho are “transmitted” to the braiding machine, while the “program” of the knitting pattern is also “stored” in the machine. The “program” for the knitting pattern is also “stored” in the holes of the perforated paper tape.

  Bouchot's idea was not completed in his hands, and the real success of the improvement came 80 years later, when another French machinist, J. Jacquard, completed the design of the “Automatic Jacquard Braiding Machine” in about 1805.

  Jaccard added a device to his Jacquard machine that was capable of manipulating 1,200 knitting needles simultaneously, and the perforated paper tape that controlled the pattern was later replaced with perforated card. It is said that only 25 years after the introduction of Jaccard's braiding machine, there were 600 of them in the countryside around Coventry, transforming the patterns on the perforated cards into beautiful floral silk cloth to the accompaniment of the poofing of the old steam engine.

  The “perforated” perforated cards of the Jaccard braiding machine not only allowed the machine to produce colorful patterns, but also signified the germination of the idea of program control, and perforated paper tape and perforated cards were widely used in early computers to store programs and data.