Now I'm wondering if anyone's ever looked into making a Turing complete 'knitting instruction set' or ever looked into whether knitting was in fact Turing complete and if not, how to make it so. Would make for an interesting master's thesis or something. I'd read that paper.
See "A Compiler for 3D Machine Knitting" and accompanying video. https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/machine-knitting-c...
An example of a particularly complex pattern can be found here, if you are interested: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-queen-susan-sha...
I am a software engineer, and my wife is a champion knitter - she knits sweaters with cabling or colorwork. She is not a software engineer by trade, but she does construct complex software for modeling primate behavior in the wild (she's a PhD candidate), so I definitely see her applying the same skillset in both contexts.
What happened (anecdotally) is that early in the history of computers, it wasn't possible to get into an engineering program for any reasonably bright woman. They're like "of course we admit women, but we already have a woman". The punch line being that they didn't even have one woman as an undergraduate. So maybe you go to a woman's college, and maybe you study math, and then you end up working as an assistant to an engineer, who is analogous to a secretary, taking engineering problems and coding them.
[Edit: I have or had a picture of the person I'm describing with a non-industrial knitting machine, but probably considerably later than the 50s when she started programming]
It certainly seems that way, at least for garment workers in industrial era (and this assumption may be inaccurate). But historically, I don't think that pattern really holds at all before the industrial era. I wonder why this was the case?
James Burke Connections, Ep. 4 "Faith in Numbers"
If anyone close to him is reading this, please thank him for me. I saw Connections many years ago, and he opened my eyes to the wonder of inventions. Anyone can make things. That’s how we got to today, just lots of interworking inventions. He changed my life.
An excerpt from his Wikipedia page[3] I think HN readers may find intriguing:
> Burke conceived a mobile app called Connections that would search Wikipedia and generate associations and connections among apparently unrelated fields of knowledge or topics. Surprises, anomalies, and unexpected perspectives on a search could emerge from using the app. According to Burke, the Connections app would be an innovative alternative to more linear internet search engines such as Google.[12] As of January 2017 the project had met only 1/3 of its Kickstarter crowdfunding goal.[13]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burke_(science_historian...
[Original Wikipedia links, numbered as quoted]
[12] http://boingboing.net/2016/11/17/james-burkes-new-project-ai...
[13] https://www.backerkit.com/projects/504632459/james-burke-con...
Others here will probably have personal memories of the late mainframe era, but my understanding is that even then writing code and punching it on to cards were not necessarily done by the same person, with code first written out long hand on special forms then punched by a specialist. [1]
[0] First, at scale, in the 1890 US census. I just published a book with a chapter on this: http://www.thesumofthepeople.com
[1] e.g. as described here https://code.likeagirl.io/the-first-program-i-ever-wrote-5a5...
Could you clarify where it doesn't hold up? The biggest issue I can think of with the loom as computer analogy is reusing previous work. Perhaps what you are describing about the boundary between the cards and the data (at least for a loom) is that you can't write data out the cards and then read it back in again. But even here, I'm not exactly sure that's theoretically watertight.
Suppose you had a seed set of cards that formed a chain. Based on that you weaved fabric which had strategically placed holes such that they could function like a card. Given that you can now write output in the same format you read input, does this mean you could use a Jacquard Loom as a Turing Machine (never mind whether someone would do such a harebrained idea)? And of course, just because you maybe could doesn't mean that anyone bothered, in large part for the reasons that the inventor of the tabulator machine chose to use punch cards (rather than fabric) in the first place!
That machine you reference does seem to be the first machine that can both write and read to its input medium, the punch card, and from there, I suppose, it is history. Still, I'm convinced that there's something very interesting and maybe core to computation embedded in humanity's usage of the loom and in fabric itself. We can earnestly consider it a predecessor to the printing press (and tabulating machines) in how it provided technology to store and preserve bytes of data (representing bitmapped images) in fabric. This is another grasp in the dark, but it almost reminds me a little bit of the FFT.
Machines that could both read and punch cards in a programmable way were fairly rare. Keypunches could make a copy of a card, and even copy only selected fields, but that was about it. IBM built devices that could read a card, multiply, and punch the result in the same card. (Also see the McClure Multiplying Punch, a mechanical monstrosity from Powers-Samas in England. This could not only multiply, it could so in pounds, shillings, and pence.)
As I've pointed out before, the early history of computing was a long, hard slog trying to make a storage device. Mechanical arithmetic was old; Pascal built a mechanical adder in 1645 (!) and Leibniz built a mechanical multiplier in 1694. IBM had an electronic multiplier in R&D before WWII. But the first computing machine with significant memory (a delay line) was built around 1947. It was clear by the late 1930s that cheap, fast memory would make computing a lot easier, but cheap DRAM was many decades away.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apollo-11-the-seamstresses-who-...
I think the market wasn’t ready for that then, but perhaps with devices like the Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, and the right software, a new loom boom could be reborn.
https://kotaku.com/this-long-lost-nintendo-knitting-machine-...
https://hackaday.com/2020/03/11/there-really-was-a-sewing-ma...
[1] https://thestrangeloop.com/2018/its-just-matrix-multiplicati...
I've never looked that much into knitting, but the instructions seem remarkably similar to assembly language instructions. Beyond that, I did a little bit of research into a jacquard loom works the other day, and realized it operated using punch cards. This really fascinates me, because it seems to precede Babbage's machine and yet I never have read particularly much treatment of it in history of computing type treatises.
I wonder if, given some of the conventionally more feminine stereotyped gender roles pertaining to knitting and clothmaking, any of this played into what early conceptions of what a "programmer" was? Was there a point where people reasonably made the inference that the closest analog for what early punch card programming was would be jacquard loom operation and knitting? It is fascinating how it the idea of the vocation of writing software flipped the other way in terms of gender stereotypes.