One mechanical idea — separating the pattern from the machine that executes it — runs in a continuous line from a perforated paper roll in a Lyon silk shop to every program ever written.
Basile Bouchon 1725 · Lyon
A perforated paper roll selects which needles in a drawloom rise. Holes guide the needle through; an unbroken section blocks it. The pattern lives on the paper, not in the loom — the loom merely reads. No one calls this a program for two hundred years.
Jean-Baptiste Falcon 1728
Bouchon's son-in-law replaces the continuous paper roll with a chain of stiff rectangular cards laced together. Cards can be reordered, swapped, copied, archived. The pattern becomes a physical object you can hold in your hand, hand to a colleague, store on a shelf.
Jacques de Vaucanson 1745
Working from a Royal commission, Vaucanson attaches a cylinder that advances Falcon's cards mechanically. The drawboy — the apprentice who pulled the cords by hand — is no longer needed. The loom now operates from its program alone. Vaucanson's machine sits ignored in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers for fifty years; the silk weavers' guild resists the loss of work.
Joseph-Marie Jacquard 1804
Jacquard, born and dying poor in Lyon, combines Bouchon's holes, Falcon's chained cards, and Vaucanson's cylinder into a practical attachment that mounts on top of a regular handloom. By 1812 there are ten thousand of them in Lyon. Patterns that took a year now take a day. Angry weavers throw Jacquard into the Saône; he survives. The state pays him a pension and grants him a royalty on every loom sold.
Charles Babbage & Ada Lovelace 1837–1843
Babbage proposes the Analytical Engine and adopts Jacquard's punched cards directly: separate decks for "operations" and "variables", anticipating program and data as distinct kinds of input. Ada Lovelace writes that "the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves," and produces what is now recognised as the first published algorithm — a deck for computing Bernoulli numbers. The Engine is never built. The metaphor lasts.
Herman Hollerith 1890 · US Census
Hollerith sees Jacquard's holes from a different angle. If holes can encode pattern, holes can encode data. The 1890 US census is tabulated electromechanically in two years instead of eight. Hollerith's company becomes IBM in 1924. The 80-column punched card runs on, unchanged in essentials, until the 1980s.
From a perforated paper roll in a Lyon silk shop to every program ever written — one continuous mechanical idea, refined for two and a half centuries.
Sources: Posselt, The Jacquard Machine (1888); Essinger, Jacquard's Web (2004); Lovelace, Note A to Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine (1843). Full list at docs/sources.md.