You know how the Eiffel Tower won the Grand Prize at the 1889 World Fair? Well, it had to share the glory with a book.
Not any book: A book ENTIRELY WOVEN IN SILK.
You heard right. And nerds, get this: All pages of this book were produced on the Jacquard loom in 1889, using thousands (200k-500k) of punch cards. Only 50-60 copies were made. >
The loom had to make tiny movements on the scale of a TENTH of a millimetre producing tthe 400x400 resolution per inch². The woven sheets were then glued over super thin cardboard to allow the pages to be turned.
It took two years of trial and error to get the first book done.
It might be the first book produced by a program? Depends on what you mean by "program", but there's a good case to be made. (see next toot for sources)
I found out about this from Twitter, via https://twitter.com/PiersatPenn/status/1455347046798565380, and foud the detail picture above from https://twitter.com/DrKarrSchmidt/status/1427616209042870274.
See https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=1549 for more details and sources, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hk5500VK2k to see the punch cards.
@rixx HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS?
I must tell the world.
@rixx It appears that the punch cards survive. I see no reason that I should not build a Jacquard Loom simply to "print" myself a copy.
Someone tell me why I'm wrong or I'm buying parts on the Internet later tonight.
I *think* it was named from Knuth's concept of Literate Programming, which had verbs for "weave" and "tangle" to produce different outputs for computers and humans
@guenther I don't know you, but I like you
(spent several years as a CTP/PostScript debugging person)
@gerwitz only example I can find without spending too much time is this:
I remember there were far better ones
While the Inland Printer archives are on archive.org, a single volume comprises thousands of pages
@rixx
I’m not a geek, but my husband and I are sufficiently nerdy that when we do a holiday we make a priority list of museums (esp science museums) and art galleries to visit.
eg On our honeymoon, almost 45 years ago, our first site-seeing visit was the Ontario Museum of Science.
So we’ve seen many looms, and learned of the role which weaving and music (consider pianolas etc) have played in the evolution to big tech.
My brief experience with Fortran was before I appreciated the big picture
@rixx Do you have a URL reference for this?
It’s amazing. I did a course in Fortran in first year medicine over 50 years ago, (because I was bored) - but found the programming mind-numbingly boring so stuck with medicine.
To think the programming origins if the likes of fortran could create this … makes me realise the big picture cannot be lost, when you only focus on a small part.
@rixx Wow! First books printed on a dot matrix "printer"?
Hey, @mkirschenbaum, were you aware of this?
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