By the early 1800s, the Industrial Revolution had already proven something remarkable: steam and gearwork could replace human muscle at scale.

Joseph-Marie Jacquard's loom (1801) went one step further — it replaced not just labor, but a kind of decision-making. A chain of punched cards, read mechanically, told the loom exactly which threads to raise for every single pass of the shuttle.

Change the cards, change the pattern. The procedure — the algorithm — was now separate from the machine that executed it, encoded on something you could hold in your hands.

Babbage noticed. He planned to use these very same punched cards to feed instructions into his own Analytical Engine.