>> Amazing! Next up, we have Allie
Jones, who is going to talk about
weaving and programming. Which you might
not have thought were related. But they
are!

(applause)

 >> Okay. So... Before I was a
programmer, who loved fiber arts, I was
a textile designer who really loved
computers. And while I was studying
textile design, I learned that the
history of weaving technology is
actually totally critical to the
development of computers, the way we use
them today. And if you've never gotten
to experience learning that two things
that you really like are actually really
closely related when you thought they
didn't have anything to do with each
other, it's a really awesome feeling and
super exciting. So what I'm hoping to do
is explain a little bit about how
weaving works and why I think weaving is
cool, so you can understand the
relationship between weaving and
programming and get to experience a
little bit of this excitement for
yourself.

So what is weaving in the first place?
So weaving is one of the most common
ways that you can take yarn and turn it
into fabric. Knitting is the other one.
It uses one really long piece of string
and loops and makes it stretchy. Weaving
uses lots of pieces of string and makes
it not stretchy. So your jeans are made
out of woven fabric and your T-shirts
are made out of knitting. There we go.
So a woven fabric has two categories of
yarn. There's the warp, which goes up
and down and is highlighted in blue
here, and there are lots of those. They
run parallel to each other along the
length of the fabric. And there's the
weft, which is one long piece of thread,
to make different colors, that goes back
and forth and interlaces between the
warp threads. If you've done this craft
project with construction paper, that's
basically weaving, and making this
fabric called plain weave. That's the
simplest way to make a woven fabric. And
this is the simplest loom you can have.
Called a tapestry loom. And if you look
at this picture, you can get an idea of
how slow and tedious making something on
a tapestry loom can be. You're taking
your hands or maybe a fork or something.
And you can make incredible things this
way, but it'll take a really long time
and be really tedious.

So people tried to invent looms that
were faster and allowed you to make more
complicated fabrics more easily. So this
is a loom with harnesses, which are
basically frames that hold a bunch of
warp threads together in a loop and
those frames are connected to pedals, so
you can press the pedals in a specific
order, and it'll allow you to lift the
threads. But you're still limited in the
complexity, because mechanically, you
can't have that many frames and you're
limited in the number of warp threads
you can lift at a time. But in a loom
like this, you can draw out a plan for
how you're going to make a fabric. This
is source code for a fabric, called a
draft.

In the center of the draft, you have a
grid, and that represents -- each square
is an intersection of a warp and a weft
thread. The horizontal is a weft, and
the vertical is a warp. The weft is on
top if it's red. Red is on top if it's
weft. And a woven fabric is represented
by binary. All you need to know is -- if
the warp is on top here, or is it the
weft? The top part of this diagram is
telling you which harnesses the thread
should be connected to. So each
horizontal row is a harness. The top
left part is how you connect the
harnesses to the pedal. That's something
you can change depending on the fabric
you're trying to make. And the left side
tells the weaver what order to press the
pedals. So you can make complicated
fabrics this way. There's a lot of
things that are possible. But each time
you want to change it, you have to
reconfigure the loom. Hooking up the
pedals a different way, or taking off
the thread and rethreading it which is
tedious. And you can't get something as
detailed as a tapestry fabric. A lot of
people tried to improve this. But this
is the most successful. This is Joseph
Marie Jacquard. This is still called the
Jacquard loom. It used a series of punch
cards to record which thread should be
connected in a pattern. If a hook could
control through a pattern in a card,
that was lifted. So you could change
each one differently, and you could
change the entire pattern you were
weaving by swapping out cards, without
having to make any changes to the loom.
And that picture I showed you of
Jacquard is a Jacquard fabric. So this
took 24,000 cards to weave. And I think
it was about this tall. But you can see
in this close-up that there are
interesting parallels between bitmap
rastered images we make on computers
today. There's a pixel happening here.
There's dithering. And if you have
multiple fabrics, you can make an
illusion of having more colors than you
really do. So if you're familiar with
how computers work, you might see where
this connection is coming together. So
here we have Charles Babbage, the
English scientist and inventor. And he
loved this portrait of Jacquard. He
loved to show it to party guests and ask
how it was made and laugh at them when
they got it wrong. So in 1822, he
started developing this machine called
the difference engine, which can
basically do arithmetic. It was totally
mechanical and a lot like early looms,
you had to kind of reconfigure the
entire machine to do a different
calculation. And this picture and the
next picture -- he never managed to
finish these, but people have created
replicas of them in modern times, and
they actually do work. So he wasn't
happy with that. In 1837, he started
this new project called the Analytical
Engine which would be much more general
purpose. It also used punch cards for
input, and Babbage wrote that he was
directly inspired by Jacquard's looms
using punch cards as well. The
Analytical Engine used two different
kinds of punch cards. One was the
variable and the other was the
operation. So you could change the input
and the operation. Ada Lovelace was also
really interested in the looms. She
translated an Italian paper on the
Analytical Engine and wrote a lot of
notes that ended up being longer than
the paper itself. Her notes wound up
being the first computer program. And
she mentioned Jacquard looms (inaudible)
also this quote. We may say most
aptly that the Analytical Engine was
(inaudible) (on screen)

But then there's kind of a pause in the
development of computers for a while.
Charles Babbage lost funding and never
finished either of his machines and Ada
Lovelace died young, so nothing happened
for about 100 years. But then we have
this guy, Herman Halloran, whose brother
owned a Jacquard loom in New York. And
he invented this machine called the
tabulating machine that used punch cards
to record information and calculate
assumption. So it was used in the 1890
census, and each person would have a
card and you could feed this into the
machine and it would tell you how many
people were male or female and do all
this much faster than previous, which
was just done by clerks, hundreds of
clerks in a room for months and months.
So he sold this machine to a company
called the computing tabulating
reporting company. But it turned out
that this machine he built was the most
successful product they had and they
decided to change their name to a
company that will probably be more
familiar to you, IBM.

So IBM sold punch card machines for a
really long time. Well into the 1980s.
And in the '30s, they were selling 3
billion punch cards a year. And the
machines could process 30,000 cards an
hour. As an aside, if you've ever
wondered why 80 characters is the
default width for a terminal, it's
because these punch cards have 80
columns on them. After that, there's a
lot of other advances in computing that
you're probably familiar with. That's
ENIAC, the personal computer, smart
phones, and all that other stuff. But
actually, we can bring things back to
weaving again, because once computers
existed, then computers would be brought
back to help weavers make more awesome
things too. So in 1983, the first
computerized Jacquard loom was invented.
This picture does not do justice to
how gigantic this is. If you look at the
ladder, that's twice the height of a
person. The looms run their own versions
of UNIX and have hard drives and all
this stuff. There's super elaborate CAD
software that allows you to design
fabrics like this.

And the combination of weaving and
computers together allows you to make
really beautiful, complicated things,
like you could never make with those two
things separate. So I hope you enjoyed
this little bit of computing history and
fiber nerdery. Thank you!

(applause)