The month of July is marked in our history by several inaugurations from the births of significant pioneers through the announcement of new machines and the establishment of computer companies. July includes the birth of Joseph-Marie Jacquard, born 7 July 1752, in Lyons, France. In the late 18th century Jacquard developed a practical automatic loom which wove patterns controlled by a linked sequence of punched cards . It was from this development that both Charles Babbage and Herman Hollerith derived their own use of cards for their respective machines.
Jacquard looms are still in use today throughout the world.
Jacquard died on 7 August 1834, in Ouillins, France. The company that Hollerith formed eventually, after mergers, became IBM, a company that for thirty years promoted and benefited from mechanical punched card processing. Thus it was appropriate that the first IBM production-line machine, the IBM 650, was designed to be upwardly compatible from the well established line of mechanical card processing machines. Being a decimal machine, the programming and data representation was simpler than many earlier machines, and like later personal computers, was soon supported by effective application packages. In all over 1000 IBM 650 computers were delivered to organizations throughout the world.