Jacquard loom
The silk industry, however, did not gain any benefit from innovations in spinning, as silk did not require spinning in order to be woven. Furthermore, the production of silver, and gold silk brocades was a very delicate and precise process, with each color needing its own dedicated shuttle. In the 17th and 18th centuries, progress began to be made in the simplification and standardization of silk manufacture, with many advances following one after another. Bouchon and Falcon's punched card loom appeared in 1775, later improved on by Jacques de Vaucanson. Later, Joseph-Marie Jacquard improved on the designs of Falcon and Vaucanson, introducing the revolutionary Jacquard loom, which allowed a string of punched cards to be processed mechanically in the correct sequence. The punched cards of the Jacquard loom were a direct precursor to the modern computer, in that they gave a (limited) form of programmability. Punched cards themselves were carried over to computers and were ubiquitous until their obsolescence in the 1970s. From 1801, embroidery-style designs became highly mechanized, due to the effectiveness of the Jacquard loom in imitating embroidered fabrics. The mechanism behind the Jacquard looms even allowed complex designs to be mass-produced.