I want to show you how information was recorded on punch cards. For example, we will write the word “Hello” on this punched card.

This photo shows a punched card that has no information written on it (i.e. it is “blank”).
Information on such punched cards was recorded by punching holes in certain places; if there was a puncture, then it is “1”, and if there was a puncture in certain place no – then “0”. On the first and last three rows, service information was noted, but eight rows (from the row with zeros to the row with sevens) are exactly the rows where the data itself was stored in the form of pierced dots, the dots were pierced where necessary, in place of the indicated numbers row.

The slice in the upper left corner shows where the “beginning” of the punched card is; it is obvious that this side was inserted into the punched card read/write drive. I want to say in advance that this punched card has a memory capacity of 80 bytes!

Those. One regular 1.44 megabyte floppy disk can store approximately the same amount of information as 18,000 punch cards!!! Now, I hope you can imagine why, when floppy disks were invented, they said that tons of punched cards were instantly no longer needed.

On occasion, I would like to show how information was recorded on punched cards. For example, we need to write the word “Hello” on this punched card.


We know that a computer uses only zeros and ones in its work (no electrical signal / there is a signal). These zeros and ones are called bits. 8 bits equal one byte.

So, there are 8 digits “0” or “1” in a byte, which can be placed in different combinations, for example, these are all bytes: 01010101, 00000000, 01100100, 11111100...

As you can see, there can be a lot of combinations of placing zeros and ones in a byte, and there are 256 of them in total. That is There are 256 “different bytes” in a computer. But for the convenience of people, the computer designates these bytes with alphabetical symbols, numbers and different signs, because it is easier for us to perceive the letter “N” than, for example, the combination “11000101”.

These ways of designating binary combinations are called code tables; they are different in each operating system, and in each computer, but they can also be the same, and in general, the programmer can change the type of computer symbols at his own discretion, just as the well-known program for DOS – keyrus.

This program adds Cyrillic letters to the standard character table operating system DOS (which was created in America, where, naturally, no one thought about the Cyrillic alphabet), and now we can create and comfortably work in programs where the inscriptions are written in Cyrillic, and if we do not run the keyrus program, then instead of the Cyrillic inscriptions there will be different “hieroglyphs” , i.e. other non-Cyrillic characters.
I hope you have already understood that each letter from the word “hello” has its own binary counterpart. To translate the word, we will use the code page of the MS-DOS operating system
its code page is called ASCII, and in Windows, for example, the code page is called Windows-1251.
To write the word “hello”, you first need to convert each of its letters (bytes) into the decimal code of the ASCII table, I no longer remember the code table.
And I don’t have the book with the codes with me right now, so I had to a quick fix“build” a Pascal program that gave me the decimal codes for each letter of the word “hello”
The program itself is incredibly simple, but the standard Pascal function “ord” helped us a lot:


We run the program, and now we have received the letter codes for the word “hello”: “P”-143, “p”-224, “i”-168, “v”-162, “e”-165, “t”-226.
These codes in decimal system calculus, and the computer works in binary, so let’s convert them using a regular calculator:




All!
We have binary codes that can be “written” onto a punch card, starting from the top left corner and moving down, and the next byte again at the top left, below the previous byte, and so on...
This is what the written word “Hello” will look like on a punched card
(black ones indicate ones, but there are “no” zeros, or rather, they are not marked). Now, if you try to count this punched card, the computer counts units, and where there is no light/mechanical contact (since the holes are not punched), the computer will “understand” that zeros are “written” on the punched card. After this, the computer program recodes the binary codes into character codes, and according to these codes, it will display the inscription “Hello” on the screen.

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Evolution of storage media. Part 1: From Punch Cards to DVDs

Data storage technologies have been actively improved since the advent of the first computers. Just yesterday we used 1.44-megabyte floppy disks, and today you can find 256-gigabyte flash drives on sale. But this is far from the limit. While engineers work to create new, more advanced storage media, we remember how punch cards, magnetic tapes and CD and DVD formats influenced the computer industry.

Since ancient times, people have been looking for ways to record and store various information. At first they painted on rocks and clay. Then parchment appeared, and later paper. In the 20th century, with the advent of the first computers, it became easier to store information, but the evolution of storage media only accelerated. It would seem like just yesterday we were writing the files we needed onto floppy disks. And today we already use 256 GB flash drives! In general, the development of information storage technologies does not stand still. Therefore, this time we remember where the history of computer storage media began, and we will talk about what results the industry achieved by the end of the 20th century.

Jacquard machine. Punch cards

The history of storage media dates back to the beginning of the 19th century. Moreover, it acts as the progenitor of storage devices - who would have thought! - loom. The author of the first invention in the field of data storage was the French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard. For a long time He worked with machines as an apprentice, weaver and adjuster, so his wealth of experience greatly helped him in his further inventive activities. So what was Jaccard's innovative idea? Despite the fact that fabric production at that time was a rather complex process, at its core it was a constant repetition of the same actions. Jaccard concluded that this process could be automated.

The French inventor came up with such a system, which used special solid plates with holes in its work. They were the world's first punched cards. Previously, similar plates were used in Vaucanson and Bouchon machines, but these devices were too expensive to produce and for this reason never took root. In his own development, Jacquard took into account all the shortcomings of these devices. The number of rows of holes in the plates was increased, which ensured the processing of a larger number of threads, and, consequently, increased productivity of the machine. In addition, the process of feeding plates into the reading device - a set of probes connected to thread rods - has been significantly simplified. As the plate passed, the probes fell into the holes, lifting up the corresponding threads and forming the main overlaps in the fabric. Thus, a certain combination of holes on the plate made it possible to create fabric with the desired pattern.

Jacquard created the first automated machine in 1801 and refined it over the course of several more years. For his achievements, the inventor received a pension of 3,000 francs and the approval of Napoleon. However, neither Jacquard himself nor the French emperor had any the slightest idea how important this invention will become in the future.

In the 30s of the 19th century, the English mathematician Charles Babbage drew attention to the punch cards developed by Jaccard. At that time, the scientific mind was working on the creation of an analytical engine and decided to use punched cards in its design. For this, the Englishman even made a trip to France in order to study Jacquard’s machines in detail. Alas, but because low level technology and lack of financial resources, Babbage's analytical engine never saw the light of day. However, its design later became the prototype of modern computers.

In addition, punched cards were used in the tabulator developed in 1890 by Herman Hollerith. The tabulator was a mechanism for processing statistical data and was used for the benefit of the US Census Bureau. By the way, the Tabulating Machine Company created by Hollerith was eventually renamed International Business Machines (IBM). For several decades, IBM developed and promoted punch card technology. In the middle of the 20th century they were used everywhere, becoming especially widespread in computer technology and various machines. The decline of the era of punched cards came in the 1980s, when they were replaced by more advanced magnetic storage media. Interestingly, IBM's punch card research department existed until the 2000s. For example, in 2002, IBM was studying the creation of a punched card the size of a postage stamp that could hold up to 25 million pages of information.

Magnetic disks

Despite the fact that punched cards were easy to manufacture, they also had a number of rather significant disadvantages. Firstly, it is a small capacity. A standard punched card contained about 80 characters, which corresponded to 100 bytes of information. This is very little. Judge for yourself: storing one megabyte of data would require over ten thousand of these punch cards. Secondly, it is low read and write speed. Even the most advanced reading devices could process no more than one thousand punched cards per minute. That is, they read only 1.6 KB of data per second. And thirdly, this is low reliability and the impossibility of repeated recording. Of course, the concept of “reliability” is not entirely correct to use in relation to punched cards. However, you must admit that it is not difficult to damage a plate made of thin cardboard. In addition to this, it was necessary to make holes in the cards very carefully and carefully: one extra “hole” - and the punched card became unusable, and the information stored on it was irretrievably lost.

A new approach to data storage was required. And in the middle of the 20th century, the first magnetic storage media were created. The era of this type of storage device was opened by magnetic film developed by the German engineer Fritz Pflumer. A patent for this device was issued back in 1928, but the German authorities “hidden” the technology within the country for so long that it became known outside the country only after the end of World War II. The magnetic film was made from a thin layer of paper onto which iron oxide powder was sprayed. When recording information, the film was exposed to a magnetic field, and a certain magnetization was retained on the surface of the tape. This property was then used by reading devices.

Magnetic tape was first used in the UNIVAC-I commercial computer, released in 1951. By the way, its first copy ended up in the same US Census Bureau. The magnetic film used in UNIVAC-I was much more capacious than punched cards. Its volume was equal to the capacity of ten thousand punched cards, that is, it was approximately 1 MB.

Development of magnetic tape technology continued until the 1980s. During this time, such drives were used mainly in mainframes and minicomputers. Well, since the 80s, magnetic tape has been used only for backup data storage. This was facilitated by the fact that tape cartridges remained a reliable and very cheap storage medium. But even despite these advantages, by the end of the 2000s, experts predicted the end of the era of magnetic tapes - prices for hard drives continued to fall. In addition, they offered high recording density. Since 2008, the tape drive market has shrunk by about 14% per year, and even the technology's ardent proponents have acknowledged that it has no chance of survival. However, the situation changed dramatically in 2011. In Thailand there was a flood that lasted, according to official data, 175 days. As a result of the flood, several industrial zones were inundated, where hard drive factories of companies such as Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba were located. As a result, product prices increased by 60%, and production volumes fell. So magnetic tape got a second life.

It is worth noting that tape drives are typically used in areas where it is necessary to store very a large number of information. For example, in any large studies. Thus, magnetic tape is used to record the results of research at the Large Hadron Collider. Alberto Pace, head of CERN’s data processing and storage division, once spoke about the advantages of the technology. He noted that magnetic tape has four main advantages over hard drives. First of all, it's speed. Although it takes a specialized robot up to 40 seconds to select the correct tape and insert it into the reader, reading data from the tape is four times faster than from a hard drive. Another advantage of magnetic tape, according to Pace, is its reliability. If it breaks, it can be easily glued together. In this case, only a few hundred megabytes of data are lost. When it fails HDD, absolutely all data is lost. The head of the CERN division provided some statistics regarding the reliability of the devices. Thus, on average, per year at CERN, out of 100 petabytes of data stored on magnetic tapes, only a few hundred megabytes are lost. Hard drives contain about 50 petabytes of information, and every year an organization loses up to several hundred terabytes as a result of HDD failures. The third advantage of magnetic tape is its energy efficiency, or rather, cost-effectiveness. The tapes themselves are stored in an inactive state, therefore they do not consume energy. Finally, the fourth thing is safety. If attackers gain access to hard drives, they can destroy all information in a matter of minutes. In the case of magnetic tapes, this can take more than one year.

Two more advantages of tape drives were pointed out by Evangelos Elefthero, head of the storage technologies department at the IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich. He noted that magnetic tapes are still cheaper than hard drives. 1 GB HDD costs approximately 10 cents, while the cost of similar magnetic tape capacity is estimated at 4 cents. Elefthero also paid attention to the durability of the tapes. Such a drive will serve faithfully even after 30 years, while the duty cycle of a hard drive is only 5 years.

However, it is worth understanding that magnetic tape will never again be used as the only data storage system. They occupy an important place in the hierarchical structure of information storage, but are not (and will not be) its main link.

Floppy disks

The next stage in the development of magnetic storage media was the floppy disk, which was introduced in 1971. IBM worked on the creation of the device. In 1967, the blue giant needed to send software updates to customers, and a team of engineers led by Alan Shugart came up with the idea of ​​a compact and fast floppy disk. A few years later, IBM created an 8-inch floppy disk with a capacity of 80 KB with the ability to write once. The solution was not very successful, since it attracted a lot of dust and was too fragile for a pocket device. Therefore, the developers decided to package the floppy disk in a protective plastic casing with a fabric lining.

By design, the floppy disk was a disk made of polymer materials on which a magnetic coating was applied. The plastic casing had several holes. The central one was intended for the drive spindle, the small hole was an index hole, that is, it made it possible to determine the beginning of the sector. Finally, through a rectangular hole with rounded corners, the drive's magnetic heads worked directly with the disk.

To read floppy disks, computers began to be equipped with disk drives, but the cost of such devices was comparable to the cost of the entire system. Therefore, many continued to use cassettes. It took a long time until floppy disks replaced magnetic tapes.

After the creation of the first floppy disk, work on this standard continued. In 1973, the capacity of the 8-inch floppy disk increased to 256 KB, and two years later its capacity was as much as 1000 KB. The main disadvantage of the floppy disk then was its size. The diameter of the disk reached a decent 203 mm, and this does not take into account the floppy disk body. At best, such a device could fit into a backpack or medium-sized bag. But the floppy disk was conceived as handheld device! Therefore, in 1976, Shugart proposed a new format - 5.25 inches.

Why exactly this size? There is an opinion that Alan Shugart was once sitting at a bar with An Wang from Wang Laboratories. The engineers were discussing a new floppy disk format, and during the conversation the idea arose to create a device the size of a napkin. The new solutions are called mini-floppy.

In design, 5.25-inch floppy disks differed only slightly from their 8-inch counterparts. The position of the holes on the floppy disk has partially changed, and the case has become stronger. The edges of the drive hole were protected with a plastic or metal ring. Initially, the volume of such floppy disks was 110 KB, but by 1984 it was increased to 1.2 MB. It was with 5.25-inch solutions that the widespread distribution of floppy disks began. This was facilitated by a lower price compared to 8-inch devices.

In 1981, the floppy disk acquired its usual format - 3.5 inches. This design was proposed by Sony. Initially, the floppy disk size was 720 KB, but a couple of years later it was doubled. A little later, more capacious solutions with a capacity of 2.88 MB appeared. Many large companies supported the reduced standard. For example, Apple company Already in 1984, it installed drives for 3.5-inch floppy disks on Macintosh computers.

In the early 90s, the capacity of floppy disks did not satisfy all users. At the same time it was developed whole line various standards that were supposed to replace 3.5-inch floppy disks. The most popular of them was Iomega Zip. In its design, such a floppy disk largely repeated existing ones. The Iomega Zip carrier was a polymer disk coated with a ferromagnetic layer. The floppy disk body was made of plastic and had a protective shutter. The volume of such solutions was 100 or 250 MB, and after a while even 750 MB devices were released! In addition, Iomega Zip provided higher write and read speeds. However, the standard was never able to dislodge 3.5-inch floppy disks from the top. Blame it all - high price devices. And, let's face it, Zip floppy disks were not at all reliable.

Optical storage. CD

In parallel with floppy disks, the optical storage market also developed. The first sign in this area was a device called Laserdisc (LD), developed in 1969 by Philips. The medium was intended for home viewing of films. It supported analog video and sound recording. A little later, sound became digital. Laserdisc had a number of advantages over the VHS and Betamax cassette standards, but was never able to replace them. The format was mainly popular in the USA and Japan. In Europe they treated him rather coolly. By the way, the first film released on LD was Jaws. This happened in 1978 in the USA. Latest films were released on laserdisc by Paramount in 2000. Despite the failure of the standard, the technologies used in it influenced the development of next-generation formats.

Laserdisc was replaced by the much more successful Compact Disc (CD) format. The CD standard was developed with common effort companies such as Sony and Philips, and was released in 1982. Initially, CDs were intended to be used only for storing audio recordings in digital form, but over time they began to store and distribute files of all types on CDs. This was also facilitated by the fact that, starting in 1987, Microsoft and Apple began to use CD drives in their personal computers.

How does a CD work? It consists of a polycarbonate substrate coated with a thin layer of metal. This layer is protected by varnish, on which, as a rule, some pictures, logos and other things are applied. Information is recorded on the disk in the form of a spiral track of recesses, or pits (from the English pit - recess), extruded into a polycarbonate base. Typically, a pit size is about 500 nm wide, 100 nm deep, and its length varies from 850 to 3500 nm. The distance between pits is called land. Lend is usually 1.6 microns. The pits scatter or absorb the light falling on them, and the substrate reflects it. Reading information from a CD occurs using a laser beam that forms a light spot with a diameter of approximately 1.2 microns. If the laser hits the land, the receiving photodiode records the maximum signal. This is a logical unit. If light hits the pit, the photodiode detects light of lower intensity. And this will already be a logical zero.

The first CDs were intended solely for reading. During the production process, pits were immediately applied to the polycarbonate substrate, and then the surface was covered with a reflective layer and protective varnish.

For a long time, the maximum capacity of a CD was 650 MB. This was equivalent to 74 minutes of quality audio content. In the 80s, this volume seemed inexhaustible for users. Only since 2000 have 700-megabyte disks become widespread. There were also devices with a capacity of 800 MB.

But let's go back to the 80s. Soon after the release of the first CDs, users made it clear that they wanted to record the information they needed on discs at home. This is how CD-R (Compact Disc-Recordable) technology was born. CD-R blanks could be used for recording once. This required a special CD writer.

Structurally, CD-R discs differed from CDs only in the presence of one more layer between the polycarbonate and the reflector. This layer was made of organic transparent dye. The dye had an interesting property: when heated, it collapsed and darkened. While recording information to the disk, the laser, changing its power, applied dark dots to the surface of the disk - that is, it simply burned out required zones dye layer. When reading, these dark dots were perceived as pitas. CD-R technology was released in 1988.

The latest milestone in CD development was the release of the CD-RW (Compact Disc-Rewritable) standard. Unlike CD-R, such a disc could be burned multiple times. The design of the CD-RW was similar to the CD-R, except for the layer between the polycarbonate and the reflector. If the CD-R used an organic dye, then in the CD-RW it was replaced by a special inorganic active material. Under the influence of a powerful laser beam, this material also darkened and imitated pita. The darkening occurred as a result of the transition of material from state of aggregation into crystalline.

The peak of CD popularity occurred in the 90s and 2000s. And even so, talking about this standard in the past tense is somehow incorrect, because CDs are still used to this day.

DVD standard

The DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) standard was introduced to the public in 1996. Development of the format began approximately 5 years before the announcement. More precisely, it was initially planned to create two independent standards. Philips and Sony worked on MMCD (Multimedia Compact Disc) technology, and an alliance of 8 companies, including Toshiba and Time Warner, developed Super Disc. Through the efforts of IBM, the efforts of all developers were able to unite - the American company really did not want to repeat history with the competition between the VHS and Betamax cassette standards of the 70s. This is how the DVD standard came into being.

Interestingly, the technology was initially developed with video content in mind. It was expected that DVD would replace the aging videotapes. That is why at first the abbreviation stood for Digital Video Disc. Fortunately, the disk was ideal for storing data in any format, and the decryption was quickly changed to Digital Versatile Disc.

If you think that there is a very big difference between DVD and CD, then you are mistaken. Structurally, the DVD is largely the same as its predecessor. The main difference is that DVDs use a red laser with a wavelength of 650 nm, which is 130 nm less than CDs. This made it possible to reduce the size of the light spot, and therefore minimum size information cells. In other words, the recording density has increased. As a result, a DVD could hold 6.5 times more information than a CD.

In 1997, the DVD-R(W) standard appeared. To create it, the same technology was used that was used in CD-R. Despite this, it was still a long time before DVD-R(W) became widespread. The main obstacle to the spread of the standard was the cost of the drive and the discs themselves: the first DVD-R(W) drive cost $17,000, and each disc cost $50.

It should be noted that there is also the DVD+R(W) format, introduced in 2002. It was developed by an alliance of companies that included Sony and Philips. The fact is that when creating DVD-R(W), all the wishes and developments of the companies of this alliance were not taken into account. This is how DVD+R(W) appeared. This format differed from the “minus” one in that it had special markings that simplified the positioning of the head, and a different reflective layer material.

As for DVD capacity, it is usually 4.7 GB. In addition, there are also dual-layer DVDs. In such devices, information is recorded in two different layers - a regular lower one and a translucent upper one. To read information from different levels the laser must change focus. Dual-layer discs can hold up to 8.5 GB of data. After double-layer discs, double-sided discs appeared. These disks have working sides on both sides. Each side is double layered. The volume of such a disk is 17 GB.

Instead of a conclusion

At this point, the development of the DVD standard stopped - the developers realized its full potential. DVD has been replaced by HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats. But we’ll talk about them, as well as flash memory, hard drives and many other technologies next time.

Original taken from: When did computer numerical control machines appear?

Back in the 18th century. True, the machines were not metal-cutting, but weaving.

For many years, punched cards served as the main media for storing and processing information. Punched cards are the ancestors of floppy disks, disks, hard drives, and flash memory. But they did not appear with the invention of the first computers, but much earlier, at the very beginning of the 19th century...

On April 12, 1805, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife visited Lyon. The country's largest weaving center in the 16th–18th centuries suffered greatly from the Revolution and was in a deplorable state.

Most of the manufactories went bankrupt, production stood still, and the international market was increasingly filled with English textiles. Wanting to support Lyon craftsmen, Napoleon placed a large order for cloth here in 1804, and a year later he arrived in the city in person.

During the visit, the emperor visited the workshop of a certain Joseph Jacquard, an inventor, where the emperor was shown an amazing machine. The huge thing, installed on top of an ordinary loom, jingled with a long ribbon of perforated tin plates, and from the loom stretched, winding onto a shaft, silk fabric with the most exquisite pattern.

At the same time, no master was required: the machine worked on its own, and, as they explained to the emperor, even an apprentice could easily service it.

Napoleon liked the car. A few days later, he ordered that Jacquard’s patent for a weaving machine be transferred to public use, and that the inventor himself be given an annual pension of 3,000 francs and the right to receive a small royalty of 50 francs from each loom in France on which his machine stood.

However, in the end, this deduction added up to a significant amount - by 1812, 18,000 looms were equipped with the new device, and by 1825 - already 30,000.

1728 - Falcon's machine

Jean-Baptiste Falcon created his machine based on the first such machine designed by Basil Bouchon. He was the first to come up with a system of cardboard punched cards connected in a chain.

The inventor lived the rest of his days in prosperity; he died in 1834, and six years later the grateful citizens of Lyon erected a monument to Jacquard on the very spot where his workshop had once been. The Jacquard (or, in the old transcription, "Jacquard") machine was an important brick in the foundation of the industrial revolution, no less important than Railway or steam boiler.

But not everything in this story is simple and rosy. For example, the “grateful” Lyons, who subsequently honored Jacquard with a monument, broke his first unfinished machine and made several attempts on his life. And, to tell the truth, he didn’t invent the car at all.

How the machine worked

To understand the revolutionary novelty of the invention, it is necessary to general outline represent the operating principle of a loom. If you look at the fabric, you can see that it consists of tightly intertwined longitudinal and transverse threads. During the manufacturing process, longitudinal threads (warp) are pulled along the machine; half of them are attached through one to the “shaft” frame, the other half – to another similar frame.

These two frames move up and down relative to each other, spreading the warp threads, and a shuttle scurries back and forth into the resulting shed, pulling the transverse thread (weft). The result is a simple fabric with threads intertwined through one another.

There can be more than two heald frames, and they can move in a complex sequence, raising or lowering the threads in groups, which creates a pattern on the surface of the fabric. But the number of frames is still small, rarely more than 32, so the pattern turns out to be simple, regularly repeating.

There are no frames at all on a jacquard loom. Each thread can move separately from the others with the help of a rod with a ring that catches it. Therefore, a pattern of any degree of complexity, even a painting, can be woven onto the canvas.

The sequence of movement of the threads is set using a long looping strip of punched cards, each card corresponding to one pass of the shuttle. The card is pressed against the “reading” wire probes, some of them go into the holes and remain motionless, the rest are recessed with the card down. The probes are connected to rods that control the movement of the threads.

1900 - weaving workshop

This photograph was taken more than a century ago in the factory floor of a weaving factory in Darvel (East Ayrshire, Scotland). Many weaving workshops look like this to this day - not because factory owners spare money on modernization, but because jacquard looms of those years still remain the most versatile and convenient.

Even before Jacquard, they knew how to weave complexly patterned canvases, but only the best masters, and the work was hellish. A worker-puller climbed inside the machine and, at the command of the master, manually raised or lowered individual warp threads, the number of which sometimes amounted to hundreds.

The process was very slow, required constant concentrated attention, and mistakes inevitably occurred. In addition, re-equipping the machine from one complex patterned canvas to another work sometimes took many days.

Jacquard's machine did the work quickly, without errors - and by itself. The only difficult thing now was stuffing the punch cards. It took weeks to produce a single set, but once produced, the cards could be used again and again.

Shuttle machine

At the beginning of the 19th century, the main type of automatic weaving device was the shuttle loom. Its design was quite simple: the warp threads were stretched vertically, and a bullet-shaped shuttle flew back and forth between them, pulling a transverse (weft) thread through the warp.

From time immemorial, the shuttle was pulled by hand; in the 18th century this process was automated; the shuttle was “shot” from one side, received by the other, turned around - and the process was repeated. The shed (the distance between the warp threads) for the passage of the shuttle was provided with the help of a reed - a weaving comb, which separated one part of the warp threads from the other and lifted it.

Predecessors

As already mentioned, it was not Jacquard who invented the “smart machine” - he only modified the inventions of his predecessors. In 1725, a quarter of a century before the birth of Joseph Jacquard, the first such device was created by the Lyon weaver Basile Bouchon. Bouchon's machine was controlled by a perforated paper belt, where each passage of the shuttle corresponded to one row of holes. However, there were few holes, so the device changed the position of only a small number of individual threads.

The next inventor who tried to improve the loom was named Jean-Baptiste Falcon. He replaced the tape with small sheets of cardboard tied at the corners into a chain; on each sheet the holes were already located in several rows and could control a large number threads Falcon's machine turned out to be more successful than the previous one, and although it was not widely used, during his life the master managed to sell about 40 copies.

The third who undertook to bring the loom to fruition was the inventor Jacques de Vaucanson, who in 1741 was appointed inspector of silk weaving factories. Vaucanson worked on his machine for many years, but his invention was not a success: the device, which was too complex and expensive to manufacture, could still control a relatively small number of threads, and fabric with a simple pattern did not repay the cost of the equipment.

Successes and failures of Joseph Jacquard

Joseph Marie Jacquard was born in 1752 on the outskirts of Lyon into a family of hereditary canutes - weavers who worked with silk. He was trained in all the intricacies of the craft, helped his father in the workshop, and after the death of his parent inherited the business, but he did not take up weaving right away.

Joseph managed to change many professions, was tried for debt, got married, and after the siege of Lyon he left as a soldier with the revolutionary army, taking his sixteen-year-old son with him. And only after his son died in one of the battles, Jacquard decided to return to the family business.

He returned to Lyon and opened a weaving workshop. However, the business was not very successful, and Jacquard became interested in invention. He decided to make a machine that would surpass the creations of Bouchon and Falcon, would be quite simple and cheap, and at the same time could produce silk fabric that was not inferior in quality to hand-woven fabric. At first, the designs that came out of his hands were not very successful.

Jacquard's first machine, which worked properly, made not silk, but... fishing nets. He read in the newspaper that the English Royal Society for the Promotion of the Arts had announced a competition for the manufacture of such a device. He never received an award from the British, but his brainchild became interested in France and was even invited to an industrial exhibition in Paris. It was a landmark trip.

Firstly, they paid attention to Jacquard, he acquired the necessary connections and even got money for further research, and secondly, he visited the Museum of Arts and Crafts, where Jacques de Vaucanson’s loom stood. Jacquard saw him, and the missing parts fell into place in his imagination: he understood how his machine should work.

1841 - Carkill weaving workshop

The woven design (made in 1844) depicts a scene that occurred on August 24, 1841. Monsieur Carquille, the owner of the workshop, gives the Duke d'Aumal a canvas with a portrait of Joseph Marie Jacquard, woven in the same way in 1839. The subtlety of the work is incredible: the details are finer than in the engravings.

Incredible precision of the Jacquard machine

The famous painting “The Visit of the Duc d'Aumale to the weaving workshop of Mr. Carquilla” is not an engraving, as it might seem - the drawing is completely woven on a loom equipped with a jacquard machine. The canvas size is 109 × 87 cm, the work was done by the master Michel-Marie Carquille himself for the company "Didier, Petit and C".

Process mis en carte , or programming, images on punched cards, lasted many months, and several people were involved in this, and the production of the canvas itself took eight hours. The tape of 2,400 (more than a thousand binary cells each) punched cards was a mile long.

The painting was reproduced only on special orders; several paintings of this type are known to be stored in different museums around the world.

And one portrait of Jaccard woven in this way was commissioned by the Dean of the Department of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Charles Babbage. By the way, the Duke d'Aumalle, depicted on the canvas, is none other than the youngest son of the last king of France, Louis Philippe I.

With his developments, Jacquard attracted the attention of not only Parisian academics. Lyon weavers quickly realized the threat posed by the new invention. In Lyon, whose population at the beginning of the 19th century was barely 100,000, more than 30,000 people worked in the weaving industry - that is, every third resident of the city was, if not a master, then a worker or apprentice in a weaving workshop. Trying to simplify the fabric making process would put many people out of work.

As a result, one fine morning a crowd came to Jacquard’s workshop and broke everything he had built. The inventor himself was strictly punished to leave his evil ways and take up a craft, following the example of his late father. Despite the admonitions of his brothers in the workshop, Jacquard did not abandon his research, but now he had to work secretly, and he completed the next car only by 1804.

Jacquard received a patent and even a medal, but he was wary of selling “smart” machines on his own and, on the advice of the merchant Gabriel Detille, he humbly asked the emperor to transfer the invention to public property city ​​of Lyon. The emperor granted the request and rewarded the inventor. You know the end of the story.

Punch card era

The very principle of the jacquard machine - the ability to change the sequence of operation of the machine by loading new cards into it - was revolutionary. Now we call it “programming”. The sequence of actions for the jacquard machine was given by a binary sequence: there is a hole - there is no hole.

Soon after the jacquard machine became widespread, perforated cards (as well as perforated tapes and disks) began to be used in a variety of devices.

But perhaps the most famous of these inventions - and the most significant on the path from the loom to the computer - is Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. In 1834, Babbage, a mathematician inspired by Jaccard's experience with punched cards, began work on an automatic device for performing a wide range of mathematical problems.

He had previously had the unfortunate experience of building a “difference engine,” a bulky 14-ton monster filled with gears; The principle of processing digital data using gears has been used since the time of Pascal, and now they were to be replaced by punched cards.

1824 - Babbage's difference engine

Charles Babbage's first attempt at building an analytical engine was unsuccessful. The bulky mechanical device, which was a collection of shafts and gears, calculated quite accurately, but required too complex maintenance and highly qualified operator.

The analytical engine contained everything that is in a modern computer: a processor for performing mathematical operations (“mill”), memory (“warehouse”), where the values ​​of variables and intermediate results of operations were stored, there was a central control device that also performed input functions. output.

The analytical engine had to use two types of punched cards: large format, for storing numbers, and smaller ones - program ones. Babbage worked on his invention for 17 years, but was never able to finish it - there was not enough money. The working model of Babbage's Analytical Engine was built only in 1906, so the immediate predecessor of computers was not it, but devices called tabulators.

A tabulator is a machine for processing large volumes statistical information, text and digital; information was entered into the tabulator using huge amount punched cards The first tabulators were designed and created for the needs of the American census office, but they were soon used to solve a variety of problems.

From the very beginning, one of the leaders in this field was the company of Herman Hollerith, the man who invented and manufactured the first electronic tabulating machine in 1890. In 1924, Hollerith's company was renamed IBM.

1890 - Hollerith tabulator

Herman Hollerith's tabulating machine was built to process the results of the 1890 American Census. But it turned out that the machine’s capabilities went far beyond the scope of the task.

When the first computers replaced tabulators, the principle of control using punched cards was retained here. It was much more convenient to load data and programs into the machine using cards than by switching numerous toggle switches.

In some places, punch cards are still used today. Thus, for almost 200 years, the main language in which people communicated with “smart” machines remained the language of punched cards.

| Card

Card(punched card, perforated card, from lat. perforo -I'm punching and lat. charta- a sheet of papyrus; paper) is an information carrier intended for use in automatic data processing systems. Made from thin cardboard, a punched card represents information by the presence or absence of holes at certain positions on the card.

Many people mistakenly believe that punched cards are a discovery of the 20th century, however, this is not so. The first punched cards appeared at the beginning of the 19th century and were used in a loom created by the French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard.

Joseph Marie Jacquard
So what did Jacquard come up with? In the 19th century, fabric production was a rather labor-intensive process, but at its core it was a constant repetition of the same actions. Having extensive experience as a machine operator behind him, Jacquard thought why not automate this process.

The fruit of his work was a system using huge solid plates in which several rows of holes were made. These plates were the world's first punched cards. To be fair, it should be noted that Jacquard was not an innovator in this area. French weaver inventors Basil Bouchon And Jacques Vaucanson also tried to use perforated tapes in their looms, but were unable to complete what they started.

The principle of operation of the Jacquard machine was that punched cards were fed to the input of the reading device, which was a set of probes connected to thread rods. As the perforated tape passed through the reading device, the probes fell into the holes, lifting up the corresponding threads. So a certain combination of holes in a punched card made it possible to obtain desired pattern on fabric.

In computer science, punched cards were first used in the “intelligent machines” of a college adviser S.N. Korsakov(1832), mechanical devices for information retrieval and classification of records.

The main advantage of punched cards was the simplicity and ease of data manipulation. Cards could be added or removed anywhere in the deck, and one card could easily be replaced with another. But there were also some disadvantages, which over time began to outweigh the advantages. First of all, it is small capacity. As a rule, a punched card contained only 80 characters. This means that storing 1 MB of data would require about 10 thousand punched cards. Punch cards were also characterized by low read and write speeds. Even the fastest readers could not process more than a thousand punched cards per minute, which corresponds to approximately 1.6 KB/min. And, of course, reliability. It was easy to damage a punched card made of thin cardboard or make an extra hole.

The peak of development of punched cards occurred in the middle of the 20th century, and the end of the era came in the 1980s, when they were replaced by more advanced ones.

On April 12, 1805, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife visited Lyon. The country's largest weaving center in the 16th–18th centuries suffered greatly from the Revolution and was in a deplorable state. Most of the manufactories went bankrupt, production stood still, and the international market was increasingly filled with English textiles. Wanting to support Lyon craftsmen, Napoleon placed a large order for cloth here in 1804, and a year later he arrived in the city in person.

During the visit, the emperor visited the workshop of a certain Joseph Jacquard, an inventor, where the emperor was shown an amazing machine. The huge thing, installed on top of an ordinary loom, jingled with a long ribbon of perforated tin plates, and from the loom stretched, winding onto a shaft, silk fabric with the most exquisite pattern. At the same time, no master was required: the machine worked on its own, and, as they explained to the emperor, even an apprentice could easily service it.

Napoleon liked the car. A few days later, he ordered that Jacquard’s patent for a weaving machine be transferred to public use, and that the inventor himself be given an annual pension of 3,000 francs and the right to receive a small royalty of 50 francs from each loom in France on which his machine stood. However, in the end, this deduction added up to a significant amount - by 1812, 18,000 looms were equipped with the new device, and by 1825 - already 30,000.

1728 - Falcon's machine

Jean-Baptiste Falcon created his machine based on the first such machine designed by Basil Bouchon. He was the first to come up with a system of cardboard punched cards connected in a chain.

The inventor lived the rest of his days in prosperity; he died in 1834, and six years later the grateful citizens of Lyon erected a monument to Jacquard on the very spot where his workshop had once been. The Jacquard (or, in the old transcription, "Jacquard") machine was an important building block of the Industrial Revolution, no less important than the railway or the steam boiler. But not everything in this story is simple and rosy. For example, the “grateful” Lyons, who subsequently honored Jacquard with a monument, broke his first unfinished machine and made several attempts on his life. And, to tell the truth, he didn’t invent the car at all.

How the machine worked

To understand the revolutionary novelty of the invention, it is necessary to have a general understanding of the operating principle of the weaving loom. If you look at the fabric, you can see that it consists of tightly intertwined longitudinal and transverse threads. During the manufacturing process, longitudinal threads (warp) are pulled along the machine; half of them are attached through one to the “shaft” frame, the other half – to another similar frame. These two frames move up and down relative to each other, spreading the warp threads, and a shuttle scurries back and forth into the resulting shed, pulling the transverse thread (duck). The result is a simple fabric with threads intertwined through one another. There can be more than two heald frames, and they can move in a complex sequence, raising or lowering the threads in groups, which creates a pattern on the surface of the fabric. But the number of frames is still small, rarely more than 32, so the pattern turns out to be simple, regularly repeating.

There are no frames at all on a jacquard loom. Each thread can move separately from the others with the help of a rod with a ring that catches it. Therefore, a pattern of any degree of complexity, even a painting, can be woven onto the canvas. The sequence of movement of the threads is set using a long looping strip of punched cards, each card corresponding to one pass of the shuttle. The card is pressed against the “reading” wire probes, some of them go into the holes and remain motionless, the rest are recessed with the card down. The probes are connected to rods that control the movement of the threads.

1900 - weaving workshop

This photograph was taken more than a century ago in the factory floor of a weaving factory in Darvel (East Ayrshire, Scotland). Many weaving workshops look like this to this day - not because factory owners spare money on modernization, but because jacquard looms of those years still remain the most versatile and convenient.

Even before Jacquard, they could weave complexly patterned canvases, but only the best masters could do it, and the work was hellish. A worker-puller climbed inside the machine and, at the command of the master, manually raised or lowered individual warp threads, the number of which sometimes amounted to hundreds. The process was very slow, required constant concentrated attention, and mistakes inevitably occurred. In addition, re-equipping the machine from one complex patterned canvas to another work sometimes took many days. Jacquard's machine did the work quickly, without errors - and by itself. The only difficult thing now was stuffing the punch cards. It took weeks to produce a single set, but once produced, the cards could be used again and again.

Shuttle machine

At the beginning of the 19th century, the main type of automatic weaving device was the shuttle loom. Its design was quite simple: the warp threads were stretched vertically, and a bullet-shaped shuttle flew back and forth between them, pulling a transverse (weft) thread through the warp. From time immemorial, the shuttle was pulled by hand; in the 18th century this process was automated; the shuttle was “shot” from one side, received by the other, turned around - and the process was repeated. The shed (the distance between the warp threads) for the passage of the shuttle was provided with the help of a reed - a weaving comb, which separated one part of the warp threads from the other and lifted it.

Predecessors

As already mentioned, the “smart machine” was not invented by Jacquard - he only modified the inventions of his predecessors. In 1725, a quarter of a century before the birth of Joseph Jacquard, the first such device was created by the Lyon weaver Basile Bouchon. Bouchon's machine was controlled by a perforated paper belt, where each passage of the shuttle corresponded to one row of holes. However, there were few holes, so the device changed the position of only a small number of individual threads.

The next inventor who tried to improve the loom was named Jean-Baptiste Falcon. He replaced the tape with small sheets of cardboard tied at the corners into a chain; on each sheet the holes were already located in several rows and could control a large number of threads. Falcon's machine turned out to be more successful than the previous one, and although it was not widely used, during his life the master managed to sell about 40 copies.

The third who undertook to bring the loom to fruition was the inventor Jacques de Vaucanson, who in 1741 was appointed inspector of silk weaving factories. Vaucanson worked on his machine for many years, but his invention was not a success: the device, which was too complex and expensive to manufacture, could still control a relatively small number of threads, and fabric with a simple pattern did not repay the cost of the equipment.

Successes and failures of Joseph Jacquard

Joseph Marie Jacquard was born in 1752 in the outskirts of Lyon into a family of hereditary canutes - weavers who worked with silk. He was trained in all the intricacies of the craft, helped his father in the workshop, and after the death of his parent inherited the business, but he did not take up weaving right away. Joseph managed to change many professions, was tried for debt, got married, and after the siege of Lyon he left as a soldier with the revolutionary army, taking his sixteen-year-old son with him. And only after his son died in one of the battles, Jacquard decided to return to the family business.

He returned to Lyon and opened a weaving workshop. However, the business was not very successful, and Jacquard became interested in invention. He decided to make a machine that would surpass the creations of Bouchon and Falcon, would be quite simple and cheap, and at the same time could produce silk fabric that was not inferior in quality to hand-woven fabric. At first, the designs that came out of his hands were not very successful. Jacquard's first machine, which worked properly, made not silk, but... fishing nets. He read in the newspaper that the English Royal Society for the Promotion of the Arts had announced a competition for the manufacture of such a device. He never received an award from the British, but his brainchild became interested in France and was even invited to an industrial exhibition in Paris. It was a landmark trip. Firstly, they paid attention to Jacquard, he acquired the necessary connections and even got money for further research, and secondly, he visited the Museum of Arts and Crafts, where Jacques de Vaucanson’s loom stood. Jacquard saw him, and the missing parts fell into place in his imagination: he understood how his machine should work.

1841 - Carkill weaving workshop

The woven design (made in 1844) depicts a scene that occurred on August 24, 1841. Monsieur Carquille, the owner of the workshop, gives the Duke d'Aumalle a canvas with a portrait of Joseph Marie Jacquard, woven in the same way in 1839. The fineness of the work is incredible: the details are finer than in engravings.

Incredible precision of the Jacquard machine. The famous painting “The Visit of the Duke d'Aumale to the Weaving Workshop of Monsieur Carquille” is not an engraving, as it might seem - the design is completely woven on a loom equipped with a jacquard machine. The size of the canvas is 109 x 87 cm, the work was done personally by the master Michel-Marie Carquilla for the company “Didier, Petit and Si”. The process of mis en carte, or programming, images on punched cards, lasted many months, and several people were involved in this, and the production of the canvas itself took eight hours. The tape of 24,000 (more than a thousand binary cells each) punched cards was a mile long. The painting was reproduced only on special orders; several paintings of this type are known to be stored in different museums around the world. And one portrait of Jaccard woven in this way was commissioned by the Dean of the Department of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Charles Babbage. By the way, the Duke d’Aumale, depicted on the canvas, is none other than the youngest son of the last king of France, Louis Philippe I.

With his developments, Jacquard attracted the attention of not only Parisian academics. Lyon weavers quickly realized the threat posed by the new invention. In Lyon, whose population at the beginning of the 19th century was barely 100,000, more than 30,000 people worked in the weaving industry - that is, every third resident of the city was, if not a master, then a worker or apprentice in a weaving workshop. Trying to simplify the fabric making process would put many people out of work.

As a result, one fine morning a crowd came to Jacquard’s workshop and broke everything he had built. The inventor himself was strictly punished to leave his evil ways and take up a craft, following the example of his late father. Despite the admonitions of his brothers in the workshop, Jacquard did not abandon his research, but now he had to work secretly, and he completed the next car only by 1804. Jacquard received a patent and even a medal, but he was wary of selling “smart” machines on his own and, on the advice of merchant Gabriel Detille, he humbly asked the emperor to transfer the invention to the public property of the city of Lyon. The emperor granted the request and rewarded the inventor. You know the end of the story.

Punch card era

The very principle of the jacquard machine - the ability to change the sequence of operation of the machine by loading new cards into it - was revolutionary. Now we call it “programming”. The sequence of actions for the jacquard machine was given by a binary sequence: there is a hole - there is no hole.

Soon after the jacquard machine became widespread, perforated cards (as well as perforated tapes and disks) began to be used in a variety of applications.

But perhaps the most famous of these inventions—and the most significant on the path from the loom to the computer—is Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. In 1834, Babbage, a mathematician inspired by Jaccard's experience with punched cards, began work on an automatic device for performing a wide range of mathematical problems. He had previously had the unfortunate experience of building a “difference engine,” a bulky 14-ton monster filled with gears; The principle of processing digital data using gears has been used since the time of Pascal, and now they were to be replaced by punched cards.

The analytical engine contained everything that is in a modern computer: a processor for performing mathematical operations (“mill”), memory (“warehouse”), where the values ​​of variables and intermediate results of operations were stored, there was a central control device that also performed input functions. output. The analytical engine had to use two types of punched cards: large format, for storing numbers, and smaller ones - program ones. Babbage worked on his invention for 17 years, but was never able to finish it - there was not enough money. The working model of Babbage's Analytical Engine was built only in 1906, so the immediate predecessor of computers was not it, but devices called tabulators.

A tabulator is a machine for processing large volumes of statistical information, text and digital; information was entered into the tabulator using a huge number of punched cards. The first tabulators were designed and created for the needs of the American census office, but they were soon used to solve a variety of problems. From the very beginning, one of the leaders in this field was the company of Herman Hollerith, the man who invented and manufactured the first electronic tabulating machine in 1890. In 1924, Hollerith's company was renamed IBM.

When the first computers replaced tabulators, the principle of control using punched cards was retained here. It was much more convenient to load data and programs into the machine using cards than by switching numerous toggle switches. In some places, punch cards are still used today. Thus, for almost 200 years, the main language in which people communicated with “smart” machines remained the language of punched cards.