“Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752–7 August 1834) was a French silk weaver and inventor, who improved on the original punched card design of Jacques de Vaucanson’s loom of 1745, to invent the Jacquard loom mechanism in 1804-1805. Jacquard’s loom mechanism is controlled by recorded patterns of holes in a string of cards, and allows, what is now known as, the Jacquard weaving of intricate patterns.

“The Jacquard Loom, developed in 1801, is often quoted as a source of prior art. The machine used a series of pasteboard cards with holes punched in them. The hole pattern represented the pattern that the loom had to follow in weaving cloth. The loom could produce entirely different weaves using different sets of cards. The use of punched cards was also adopted by Charles Babbage around 1830, to control his Analytical Engine.

“This innovation was later refined by Herman Hollerith who, in 1896 founded the Tabulating Machine Company (which became IBM). He invented the Hollerith punched card, the card reader, and the key punch machine. These inventions were the foundation of the modern information processing industry. The addition of a plug-board to his 1906 Type I Tabulator allowed it to do different jobs without having to be rebuilt (the first step toward programming). By the late 1940s there were a variety of plug-board programmable machines, called unit record equipment, to perform data processing tasks (card reading). The early computers were also programmed using plug-boards”.