Jacquard, Joseph Marie

French textile manufacturer. He invented a punched-card system for programming designs on a silk-weaving loom (the Jacquard loom). In 1801 he constructed looms that used a series of punched cards to control the pattern of longitudinal warp threads depressed before each sideways passage of the shuttle. On later machines the punched cards were joined to form an endless loop that represented the ‘program’ for the repeating pattern of a carpet.

Jacquard-style punched cards were used in the early computers of the 1940s–1960s.