Weaving Tapestries of Code
summary
Claim: textile tech directly becomes computing infrastructure: Jacquard-style punched media, Babbage’s partial engines and Lovelace’s algorithm lead to Hollerith → IBM terminals. Cited specifics: 24,000 punch cards for complex brocade, Roberts’s machines scale spinning from 4 to 80 threads and cut a 400‑hour task to 9 minutes, difference engines compute to 16–31 digits, IDE defaults trace to 80×24 terminals. Examples built and used: coded knitting for spies, binary sweaters, crochet hyperbolic models, and Google Jacquard jackets.
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chapters (26)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:00Charles Babbage
- 3:00Textiles
- 4:05Looms
- 5:43Jacquard Loom
- 6:14Bhushans Loom
- 7:58Falcone Loom
- 9:04Flying Shuttle
- 12:19Jacquard
- 13:13The French Revolution
- 14:06Richard Roberts
- 15:16Punching Machine
- 17:28The Difference Engine
- 19:13Ada Lovelace
- 22:00Herman Hollerith
- 22:34IBM
- 23:37IBM 1924
- 24:57Knitting and Cryptography
- 27:11The Sweater
- 29:52Lorenz Manifold
- 31:17Knitting and Crochet
- 32:55Controlling Technology
- 34:35Knitting Terminology
- 34:58Knitting Patterns
- 38:07Pattern Recognition
- 38:56Inspiration
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