M&D to 360 (Spoilers - no, Loomings - yes)

[Alan Westrope]

On Fri, 09 May 1997, RICHARD ROMEO wrote:

>dave the quaking duck:
          ^^^^^^^ [sic -- typo? Freudian slip? only PLNY knows...:-) AW]

> >Vaucanson [...] suceeded in making the first fully automated loom (1745),
> >controlled through a system of perforated cards. It was cumbersome and not
> >wholly reliable, however, and it was not until the turn of the century,
> >when it was further improved by Jacquard, that it came into widespread
> >use.
>-------------------------------------------------------------
>If I remember correctly, wasn't the technology devised for the 
>development of the loom eventually used to develop the punch card system 
>used to track immigrants entering Ellis Island, indirectly leading to the 
>development of the modern computer?

Dunno about the immigrants, but Jaquard's punched cards were adopted by
Charles Babbage around 1835 for his calculating engine, regarded by many
as a sort of proto-computer, and by Herman Hollerith for tabulating the
1890 U.S. census.  Hollerith's huge success in speeding up the census led
to his founding the Tabulating Machine Company in NYC in 1896; it evolved
into IBM.

The Hollerith/IBM punched cards were 80 columns wide, and this is the
reason many of us read the p-list on terminals with 80-column displays.
Connections, indeed.

-- 
Alan Westrope     PGP public key:  http://www.crl.com/~awestrop
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