Everything Is Related:
From Looms to Computers
by Philip Siddons

It was an ideal teaching context. Our family was spending Memorial Day at the Genesee Country Museum in Mumford New York. One of their restored buildings had an operating printing press from the 1700's. I was determined to show my thirteen year old daughter the comparative ease in desktop publishing on a computer today.

When we were standing beside the press, I began by pointing out the pieces of lead used for separating the lines of type. I explained how each letter had to be set on the plate by hand, and then only one page at a time could be produced. I talked, with some enthusiasm, about how far publishing has come in the last several hundred years. But her attention was waning.

To her, this ton of black metal with a leather handle was boring. There was nothing electronic or colorful about it. At home, at least she was interested in Ventura Publisher's ability to manipulate and place graphics on a page and set interesting fonts with a few keystrokes. So she gave me that patient pseudo look of attention while wondering when I'm going to get a real life.

"So much for a great learning experience on the history of desktop publishing" I privately said to myself.

"What I'd like to see," she inserted, is the weaving loom. The computer stuff we can talk about any time."

"Fair enough" I responded. And off we went, across the Village Square, to a quaint little house with shaker furniture, Museum volunteers sweating in their Victorian costumes, and a loom.

When we arrived, the weaver was under the loom, kneeling as she arranged strings connected to the foot pedals of the device.

We asked her about some of the apparatus and its complexity. She went across the room and showed us some of the beautiful patterned material she had produced. She talked of the hours involved and the common necessity of looms for producing household fabrics.

I've always admired people who have the propensity to do intricate and detailed work. So I said: "I suspect that in the days when people depended on these looms, the ones who were adapt at creating these decorative patterns were equivalent to our modern day computer programmers."

My daughter glanced at me out of the corners of her eyes, only to roll them heavenward, aghast in adolescent disbelief.

Looking rather surprised, the weaving expert responded: "You know, its funny you should mention that. Joseph Jacquard, a Frenchman living in the late 1700's and early 1800's, built the first successful loom for weaving patterned fabrics. To create the more complex patterns he used a system of punched cards. And this was the forerunner of the computer."

That evening I logged on to the national computer network Compuserve and looked up information on Jacquard. The on-line encyclopedia said the punched cards, for Jacquard's loom, were adopted in 1835 by the British inventor Charles Babbage for his calculator. Babbage, a mathematician at Cambridge, attempted to build an "analytical engine," a mechanical forerunner of the digital computer. Although Babbage spent his life's savings trying to produce a calculator that never fully operated, his designs proved to be correct.

The Buffalo, New York inventor and entrepreneur Herman Hollerith designed a system for recording data, using Jacquard's idea of punched holes. His device became one of the basic input mechanisms in digital computers. By 1890 he had invented machines to record and read punched cards, and this system was chosen for use in the 1890 U.S. census.

In the next decade he improved the technology and founded, in 1896, the Tabulating Machine Company in New York City. This firm eventually evolved into IBM Corporation.

As for my daughter, she seemed somewhat more interested in this progression of technology from the loom to the computer. I read her the articles from Compuserve's encyclopedia, but she had other things she wanted to do that evening. She was going to use Ventura Publisher to create an ad, with her picture on it, for her babysitting services.

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Author's note: Philip Siddons is the author of "Speaking Out
for Woman" (Valley Forge: Judson, 1980) and numerous magazine
articles. He is a freelance writer, a desktop publishing
instructor, and Director of Marketing and Advertising for
Personal Computers in Buffalo New York.