Vanishing Culture: Punch Card Knitting | Hacker News Reader

Vanishing Culture: Punch Card Knitting

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I recently bought an old Brother knitting machine (KH940) which is electronic but with a community of hackers adding third-party firmware and hardware on it [0]. There are also lots of models that read punch cards [1] and knit that purely mechanically (and later models electronically). They are a marvel of engineering that has essentially died out, only Silver Reed and Taitexma produce new models as far as I'm aware and they are often not as featureful as the old machines (SR has no garter carriages that Brother machines had 40 years ago for example).

[0]: http://www.ayab-knitting.com/ [1]: https://alessandrina.com/2015/09/03/brother-kms-punchcards-a...

A while back, Lee Valley had a 3D knitted chisel roll available for purchase, which I've always regretted not buying --- any idea on who might have made that or where to get now?

https://www.leevalley.com/en-gb/shop/tools/workshop/storage/...

I somehow doubt Dieter Schmid will have it in week 21 of this year....

Seems to be one here:

https://www.rubank.se/en/veritas-3d-knitted-chisel-roll-fits...

There must be commercial machines being made now though. Basically every knitted item you can buy today had to be machine made.

There are commercial machines, but it's important to understand that in the textile industry there's a big difference between commercial and domestic machines, and it's not necessarily that commercial machines are better.

Besides the enormous price difference, commercial machines are usually less flexible than domestic machines. They're optimized to perform a single task at production volume, rather than to do a variety of tasks. Much like how commercial sewing machines typically perform only a single stitch (as opposed to domestic machines, of which modern examples can perform an arbitrary number under computer control), commercial knitting machines can usually only perform a single type of knit. This does mean that the decline of domestic machines in some parts of the textile industry leads to a loss of capabilities that used to be available.

There are industrial knitting machines, but they’re orders of magnitude more expensive, heavier, and tied to closed software ecosystems. They’re extremely capable, but they’re also far outside the hobbyist realm. The only real evolution on these old hobbyist machines is the Kniterate at $16k and 600lbs.

I’m a knitter who’s been considering doing something like this for some time. Thank you for these links. That second one seems like a great jumping off point for this whole world.

Electronic knitting for the consumer-ish, that’s awesome!

A long time ago, I remember hearing about some castle or manor house or something like that which was being restored. There was a set of custom rugs, which, while intact, were badly faded. Somehow, they still had the original set of punch cards on hand that ran the looms, and though the machines were long gone, they were able to figure out the pattern and have a complete new set of rugs made, 100+ years later.

Sounds like a contender for the longest-ever lasting digital backup.

I would contend that it's more like a printout, or recompile from source, because of all-new materials...

https://xkcd.com/1683/

It's unsurprising too, if you consider that buildings almost always have their blueprints and designs on file with the government, and stored somewhere. The wealthy may have a "keep it all together and shove it in the attic" mindset; in 2002 I picked up a Macintosh Plus at a garage sale, and it was packaged fully functional, with accessories, cables, Print Shop, Golf, Flight Simulator, etc., all manuals, receipts from the store, and an article clipping about this new up-and-coming software company with Bill Gates at the helm.

I started my career sitting in front of a PC running XYWrite, next to a MacPaint manual that I was supposed to copy for our MacPaint clone. "Just change enough text so it doesn't look like we copied it..."

And yet, I have never actually used an Apple product except for an in-house test application running on an iPhone.

So you put on your résumé: "Human OCR scribe copyist-monk." "Job obsoleted by reCAPTCHA, Google Books in 2005?"

Then apply to work for archive.is or something

Nota Bene is still a thing! The descendant of XYWrite!

My local public library owns a computerized version of one of these, and I've been itching for a chance to use it for a full-scale project.

That said, based on my small amount of experimenting with it, I have to say I'm not surprised that the home models are hard to find anymore. They're a relic of a bygone era when home knitting was a means to an end, so having a tool to help you get to a specific practical outcome much more quickly was something a lot of people would be interested in already. And that, in turn, creates an opportunity to make products for the subset of that subset of people who still want to make it fancy.

But most knitters nowadays do it because they enjoy the physical process of knitting by hand. So tools like this arguably defeat the purpose of the hobby for a lot of people. The only person I've met who had any interest in actually owning one (instead of getting to play with someone else's, as I want to do) was a visual artist who happened to use textile as one of her media.

And now, in the Internet age, there are online services such Wildemasche that will do custom jacquard knits for you. Just upload a file with your pattern and they'll take care of the rest.

I'd like a custom blanket made with alpaca or a blend of alpaca and wool but haven't found it.

This was the first programmable machine I was ever introduced to and set me on a course to learn programming and get deeper into computers. In the 4th grade I was given a chance to be pulled out of class for a week and visit the local high school and a teacher demo'ed this machine. Super cool!

My mom worked at a jeans factory in Switzerland, in the early 80s. Apparently they used some sort of punch cards to create certain patterns in the trousers (flowers and stuff like that).

Very interesting article, will ask her if they looked like those.

Aha, I used pretty much the exact same textual format they mention in the article but for representing beat patterns in music software: https://github.com/jcelerier/drum-patterns

Curious about putting some Christmas knits into a tb808 with some dirty distortion now

> It is entirely possible to > recreate a punch card using > an image—by hand, > laboriously, with a physical > hole punch

I was quite surprised that computer vision modeling (to compensate for warping and other distortions) followed by laser cutting failed to produce the tolerances required.

Wondering whether a sprocket feed with a 'punch' in place of a 'dot-matrix head' might give better results.

I think it's a really fun quirk of history that programmers on average know more about weaving than the typical layperson. That computer science is linked to one crucial moment on a completely different historical track. It's pure serendipity and I love it

I absolutely adore mechanical systems like this. If I had the time, space and money I would spend my time collecting examples of clever mechanical systems.

My mother in law used to be a comptometer operator and I've always wanted to get hold of one and get her to show me how it was used.

I don’t know what I thought CNC stood for (something with Cutting in the name presumably) but I definitely didn’t think it stood for Computer Numerical Control.

And here am I who wonders of what use a knitted punchcard would be…

Warming those frosty bits.

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