Today in 1752, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, French inventor of the Jacquard loom, was born.
The Jacquard loom pioneered the use of punched cards to give instructions to a machine, in this case a loom weaving rugs and linens. Herman Hollerith later used punched cards for the tabulating machines calculating the results of the 1890 U.S. census. Punched cards were used as the primary input method for early computers until they were replaced by the keyboard.