Posted by David Sherman on Saturday, November 12, 2005 at 8:49PM :
In Reply to: Re: Punch Card posted by MoparNorm on Thursday, November 10, 2005 at 7:35PM :
I think you have Fortran and binary in the wrong order. The "natural" langurage of computers is binary, aka "machine code". It was the only way to program them until programming languages were invented. The first decent one was Fortran (FORmula TRANslator) whose main feature was converting ordinary mathematical formulas into machine code. Early applications included missile trajectories and other engineering calculations. It wasn't very good at keeping track of vast amounts of data, which is what businesses use computers for, so Cobol (COmmon Business Oriented Language) was invented for accounting purposes.
Punch cards were indeed originally being used to program weaving machines. The idea was borrowed by Charles Babbage in his design for the first programmable computer, which was entirely mechanical. A simplified version was built to tabulate the US census via punch cards. The "modern" punch card design as used in the build cards is attributed to one Herman Hollerith, and the cards are sometimes called "Hollerith cards".
The capability of a card-programmable loom is demonstrated by this excerpt from the 1846 Scientific American: citing C.G. Gilroy, "The Art of Weaving," mentions an improved Jacquard loom capable of "working an unlimited variety of figures and colors, as would appear from the fact that the night dress of Pope Boniface, which was woven in one of these machines, contained 276 different colors, so arranged and blended to display the likenesses of 276 heretics, each suffering under some species of torture different from any of the others."
Strange what inventors will do to publicise their inventions! 276 uniquely-tortured heretics...