The last surviving sea silk seamstress and now you can learn to code for free.

Weaving looms were part of civilizations that existed in the Paleolithic era (this is the era where humankind invented stone tools). Certainly, it was around in the Neolithic era (10,200 BC, when humans started farming). A scrap of textile was found that researchers believe dates back to 5000 BC.

Flax was the fiber most often used by Egyptian weavers at this time, but other civilizations relied on wool for making cloth, except in China and Southeast Asia, where they were already weaving silk from silkworms. By the biblical times, all major civilizations were using weaving looms.






Discussion with Maestro Chiara Vigo + screening of Il Filo dell’Acqua

Museo del Bisso di Chiara Vigo

Meanwhile . . .

Joseph-Marie Jacquard is interested in using silk for weaving and visit’s  Suzhou CHINA.

The town has also been an important center for China’s silk industry since the days of the Song Dynasty, between 960 and 1279. Jacquard visited the Suzhou Silk Factory  a near 100-year old state-owned factory in Suzhou, the city of silk in China. They were using blocks for weaving at that time and this is where Jacquard copied the idea and brought it back to France.

Mechanized Weaving

Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s Loom Uses Punched Cards to Store Patterns
1801 – 1821

The head of a shop memorized all the patterns.

In the 1700s many inventors and industrialists tried to mechanize the weaving loom. This was done with varying degrees of success and it wasn’t until the early 1800s that power-weaving became common. This took weaving out of the home, where artist would hand-weave and turned it into a mechanized process that was done at factories.

The blocks became known as “punch cards” which would allow the machine a greater flexibility than anything mankind had then invented to do calculations.

A punch card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. The information might be data for data processing applications or, as in earlier times, used to directly control automated machinery.

The terms IBM card, or Hollerith card, specifically refer to punch cards used in semiautomatic data processing.

Punch cards were widely used through much of the 20th century in what became known as the data processing industry, where specialized and increasingly complex unit record machines, organized into data processing systems, used punched cards for data input, output, and storage. Many early digital computers used punched cards, often prepared using keypunch machines, as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data.

Punch cards are the beginning of computer programs. Learn to turn the ones and zero’s on and off.

Tell the punch cards what to do 🙂

 Scott E  Fahlman             :-) 
From: Scott E  Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
things that are NOT jokes - given current trends.  For this, use

Learn to code for free.

“There are so many aspects of civilization that can be improved through better systems — and software is just a way of telling computers how to enact those systems.” — Quincy Larson