Weavers begin by hand-drawing the design on a millimetre grid. Every half-millimetre of the grid represents a cardboard Jacquard card that is punched through with a hammer, and every punched hole in the cards corresponds to a thread. If a design has a repeat of 1.5m, it requires 3,000 cards. After weavers tie the cards together one by one and hoist them atop the loom, the real work begins.
Did any other industry use cards in this way prior to the punched card era of computers?