Jacquards' Web (35 page)

Punched cards may now be obsolete technology in computing, but they have not disappeared from other application A punched card from the 1960s. The small rectangles are the punched holes.

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Weaving at the speed of light

areas. Even today they are still used for programming older machine tools, particularly printing presses. Their importance in the operation of mechanical voting machines—a curious echo of Herman Hollerith’s use of them in census-taking—continues, especially in the United States. The voter punches out a hole on a printed card to indicate his or her chosen candidate. The card is then either handed to an attendant for manual counting or placed into a vote-counting machine, which reads the card mechanically or using a light pulse. In many US states, the sheer expense of upgrading to optical scanners or touch-screen vote technology means that punched-card voting machines are likely to be used for many years to come.

This voting system received huge international attention late in the year
2000
during the neck-and-neck US Presidential Election. Imperfectly and mispunched cards suspected of possibly providing false results in Florida and conceivably also in some other states were debated by the news media for days. In retrospect, the problem was not that the system failed the US

electorate, but that the presidential race was almost unbelievably tight, making every spoiled vote a cause for major debate. As Richard K. Scher, a professor of politics at the University of Florida, said in an e-mail he sent to me:

While I fear the media very much overplayed the difficulty of interpreting some of the cards, when the difference between the candidates was only
537
votes out of nearly six million, the difficulties in reading the ambiguous ballots became central.

Whatever the eventual fate of punched cards as a way to record and store information, the immortality of the idea behind Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s loom cannot be questioned. He created a brillant system, enabling the action of a complex mechanism to be changed infinitely according to an endlessly variable set of instructions. Indeed, as we have seen, the entire concept of

‘hardware’ and ‘software’ can be traced directly to Jacquard 251

Jacquard’s Web

himself. Punched cards are no longer part of the infrastructure of the computer industry, but their influence lives on in the very way in which we make computers work for us.

There are even some technical echoes of the historical importance of punched cards in the most sophisticated modern computers. For example, if you open an MS-DOS prompt window on a personal computer the window is
80
columns wide.

This comes from the standard Visual Display Unit (VDU) size of
80
columns in width, which in turn was originally designed to allow the display of a complete
80
-column punched card.

Another example is the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) character set still used on mainframes and on some other computers. This character set is heavily influenced by punched cards; there are ‘gaps’ between the letters I and J and between R and S, just as there were on the now superseded punched cards.

These technical links emphasize the intimacy of the relationship between punched cards—originally designed for weaving—

and state-of-the-art computers.

The advance of technology has, literally, allowed us to weave at the speed of light.

252

●
17
●

The future

1 1 1 ❚ 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ❚ 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

3 3 3 3 3 3 ❚ 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 ❚ 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 ❚ 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5

6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 ❚ 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6

7 7 7 7 7 ❚ ❚ 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7

8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 ❚ 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8

9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 ❚ 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ❚ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

I don’t like trying to predict the future. Historians can’t predict the future any better than anyone else.

Thomas Bergin, editor-in-chief,

Annals of the History of Computing

The varied and intimate connections between weaving and computing come into a sharper focus, and become increasingly extensive, the more we probe into the relationship. Here is another intriguing link.

You can see it every time you peer at a computer screen. A computer is programmed to store, retrieve, and display images using
pixels
: an abbreviation for the term ‘picture element’. A computer screen is divided into tiny discrete units, each of which may or may not be illuminated (whether in monochrome or colour) in order to form part of the image.

The pixels are so small that they cannot normally be seen, but they become visible if we enlarge any item on a computer screen, including a word. For example:

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Jacquard’s Web

Here the letters have been enlarged to a size where their pixel-based structure is clearly visible. The curves of the letter are not curves at all, but a sequence of steps composed from square pixels.

This pixel-based method of representing an image bears a great resemblance to the way the master-weavers of Lyons wove images from silk. This is because the woven images created in silk fabric by the master-weavers of Lyons on the Jacquard looms still used in Croix Rousse are themselves in fact nothing more or less than digital images.

A digital image in this sense is one in which the picture is represented by a code consisting of only two elements. A digital image is made using a representational system that places the image on a grid, with the tiny squares or rectangles of the grid being either filled with a colour (which may include black or white) or left blank. The ‘filling in’ is one element and the blank-ness is the other. Those are, by the very nature of weaving and computing, the only two options.

The link between weaving and representations of letters on a computer screen can be seen very clearly by looking at how the weavers of Lyons wove words into their designs. In the Museum of the History of Weaving in Lyons, for example, there is a woven tableau made to celebrate the visit of Napoleon to Lyons on
15
January
1802
(
26 Nivôse An 10
by the short-lived ‘rational’

Revolutionary calendar). According to the message woven on it, the tableau was produced in the presence of Napoleon himself. It is inscribed with a compliment to him—
il nous a donné la paix
(‘he gave us peace’). In effect, it is a woven image of (
right
) Digital writing from 1802.

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Jacquard’s Web

digital writing. The letters are composed of little rectangular units, just like the letters on a computer screen. The woven pixels are, in effect, tiny rectangular sections of interlaced warp and weft of which the image is composed.

This remarkable resemblance between a piece of fabric woven in silk and a computer graphic shows yet again that weaving and computing are closely related expressions of the same human desire: to capture reality within a mechanism where the process is, at a fundamental level, limited to just two possible modes: yes or no, colour or blank, stitch or no stitch. Weaving, like modern computing, is indeed at heart a digital process.

Given the historical link between weaving and computing, it seems almost too great or lucky a coincidence that the largest network of computer connections in the world is called the World Wide Web. The link between Jacquard’s idea and the World Wide Web is more metaphorical than literal. All the same, the linguistic links between weaving and the amazing global phenomenon of the Internet are irresistibly strong, and thoroughly fascinating. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web, published an account of his invention in his
1999
book
Weaving the Web.
In his book, he sets down how the idea first came to him:

When I first began tinkering with a software program that eventually gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire, short for
Enquire Within upon Everything
, an old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parents’

house outside London. With its title suggestive of magic, the book served as a portal to a world of information, everything from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money. Not a perfect analogy for the Web, but a primitive starting-point.

And he continues:

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The future

What that first bit of Enquire code led me to was something much larger, a vision encompassing the decentralised, organic growth of ideas, technology and society. The vision I have for the Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything. It is a vision that provides us with new freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarchical classification systems into which we bound ourselves. It leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many. It leaves our previous fears for the future as one set among many. And it brings the workings of society closer to the workings of our minds.

The proliferation of inexpensive, powerful, and portable computers around the world has created a global
web
of connections, like a giant electronic weaving-loom with untold millions of warp threads and unlimited weft threads. Furthermore, the notion of a web with numerous connections is indeed a convenient way of understanding how the story of this book has been told. And what exactly
is
Jacquard’s Web? At one level, the web of these links between the Jacquard loom and the modern computer. Yet these links are so strong, and so compelling, and lead so irresistibly to the Internet itself, that it is not stretching credibility too far to describe the Internet itself as Jacquard’s Web.

Our story has taken us from the silk industry in Lyons in the late eighteenth century, through to the Industrial Revolution, and on to the enormous expansion of industry in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. It has covered America’s surge to economic supremacy during the twentieth century, the advances in computing during the Second World War and the technological wizardry of the modern revolution in information technology. There is, surely, something both fitting and appropriate that the story ends—at least for the time being—with a global network of billions of interconnected computers known as the World Wide Web. Or, if you prefer, Jacquard’s Web.

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Jacquard’s Web

And so we move into the future.

There has been extensive anecdotal evidence over the past few decades that trying to forecast where computing is going in the future is a close to impossible task even for those who ought to know. Many prominent computer professionals have got it embarrassingly wrong. To take just two examples, Thomas Watson himself once said he doubted whether the world would ever need more than a handful of computers, while the legendary Bill Gates of Microsoft once ludicrously underestimated the maximum amount of memory computers would ever need to contain. Gates even initially failed to spot how important a development the Internet was likely to be. He, and other gurus of the high-tech revolution, have soon come to regret their attempts to peer into the crystal ball of the technological future. This, like Harry Potter’s Mirror of Erised, has generally turned out to reflect their own current desires rather than to show what is really going to happen in time to come.

A serious difficulty with making reliable predictions about the future of computing is that the technical breakthroughs on which significant developments depend so often happen by accident, or as serendipitous spin-offs from some other process.

William Hammer’s accidental discovery of electron flow in Thomas Edison’s workshop when trying to build a more efficient light-bulb is a typical, and classical, example of this process at work. This, and breakthroughs like it, are not only fundamentally unpredictable but also very often
unimaginable
until they have actually taken place.