Jacquard's Loom showed us how coding first started before electricity was invented, let alone computers. Like we said before, when you have a machine that can do anything complex it needs a way to receive instruction. These instructions must follow whatever code the inner workings of the machine requires.
If Jacquard's machine opened up a whole new world of possibility for the creation of rugs and clothes, then the invention of electricity took things to the next level. Jacquard's machine saved our hands a lot of trouble, but when his idea of punched cards was combined with electricity by another inventor, we were able to save our brains a lot of trouble too.
This was the next step toward what coding is today. If you can understand why things went this way, then it'll be easier to learn coding later because you will fully appreciate the dismal working conditions that coding and electricity eradicated.
Watch this next video presentation to find out how one such machine effectively removed a critical problem for the US Government hundreds of years ago. It's roughly 12 minutes long.
Our story begins in the USA in the 1700s, with the first ever government run census:
So punched cards + electricity saved us the physical and mental effort of sorting through thousands of cards representing our population to give us useful insight into how to run our society.
But as we say in the video, that's all this machine could do: sort cards. Someone still had to count the cards once they were sorted. And it couldn't do any real math like adding, subtracting, multyplying etc.
But that was ok for the time, as there wasn't a pressing need for those kind of complicated maths puzzles to be solved quicker than a person could solve them.
At least there wasn't a need for it... until there was.
In the next part of our journey, we will look at why we were forced to move on to the next phase of complex calculation machinery, bringing us ever more closer to where we are today.
Unfortunately, the reasons for the next shift were not wholesome. Click the button below to move on to the next section: