I have heard it said that the word "technology" shares its roots with the word "textiles". Maybe it's not so surprising that there would be a shared interest as well!
> Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to weave," also "to fabricate," especially with an ax, also "to make wicker or wattle fabric for (mud-covered) house walls."
> It might form all or part of: architect; context; dachshund; polytechnic; pretext; subtle; technical; techno-; technology; tectonic; tete; text; textile; tiller (n.1) "bar to turn the rudder of a boat;" tissue; toil (n.2) "net, snare."
> It might also be the source of: Sanskrit taksati "he fashions, constructs," taksan "carpenter;" Avestan taša "ax, hatchet," thwaxš- "be busy;" Old Persian taxš- "be active;" Latin texere "to weave, fabricate," tela "web, net, warp of a fabric;" Greek tekton "carpenter," tekhnē "art;" Old Church Slavonic tesla "ax, hatchet;" ...
A Sanskrit origin is intriguing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary (the "Construction, fabrication" section includes *teks)
Regardless of which k of my languages I restrict myself to, I end up discovering words that are same between Farsi and that language.
I understand that this should not be surprising given their roots in Indo-Iranian languages, the largest branches of Indo-European.
Nonetheless it is delightful everytime I discover a new one by accident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card. read the precursor section.
Basile Bouchon developed the control of a loom by punched holes in paper tape in 1725. The design was improved by his assistant Jean-Baptiste Falcon and by Jacques Vaucanson.[5] Although these improvements controlled the patterns woven, they still required an assistant to operate the mechanism.
In 1804 Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated a mechanism to automate loom operation. A number of punched cards were linked into a chain of any length. Each card held the instructions for shedding (raising and lowering the warp) and selecting the shuttle for a single pass.[6]
To help debug the occasional 'dropped all the cards on the floor' accident, was the diagonal stripe across the side, after the cards have been stacked right.
This was used for computers for sure, not sure about the Jacquard looms.
With complete freedom in addressing (raising) any subset of the warps, these looms were very expressive. My favorite are multi shaft looms.
In a k-shaft loom you can only define k elementary subsets of all the warps. Makes for more interesting problem solving instances and mathematical structure.