FACTUAL REFERENCE
JACQUARD, PUNCHED MEDIA, AND CONTROL

Punched media became one of the most durable bridges between industrial automation
and computing. In textile machinery, patterns of holes could control which warp
threads were selected. The pattern therefore existed separately from the machine
that executed it.

That separation is conceptually important:

MACHINE + INSTRUCTION MEDIUM = CHANGEABLE BEHAVIOR

Punched cards and paper later became central to data processing and computing.
The technologies and implementations changed, but holes/no-holes offered a robust
way to represent discrete choices.

Do not reduce the entire history of programming to one loom. The useful point is
that punched media made machine control visibly external, repeatable, portable,
and replaceable.