Vanishing Culture: Punch Card Knitting
Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2025 11:13 am
The following guest post from digital humanities scholar Nichole Misako Nomura is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Punch cards are a fascinating binary data storage format that aren’t just history—they’re still used by knitting machines today! Thanks to the Internet Archive and other collections, we still have access to historic punch cards, but there are some technical challenges to using them in the format they’re stored in. Meet a few folx working on those challenges.
Punch card computation—the good old days, or the bad old days, depending color correction who you talk to—lives firmly in the land of “the old days” for most—a piece of history, with pedagogical and nostalgic benefit—but it’s alive and well in the textile world.
Histories of computing frequently point to the Jacquard loom as the example of the “first” code, used to create fabric in a variety of patterns—like this 1839 commemorative portrait of the Jacquard loom’s inventor, J.M. Jacquard: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002737214/. These looms use punch cards to lift warp threads above or below the weft, allowing for the mechanized creation of non-repeating patterns across the loom. (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_645517)
While the Jacquard loom gets all the attention for being the first code, the punch card knitting machine transitioned from being a Jacquard attachment on lace and knitting machines in industrial textile production to the kind of local, DIY code that a lot of people in textiles interacted with—many of whom were women. By the 1970s, they were used by people knitting for themselves and their families, for take-home piece-work, and in textile factory settings. The punch card machine was eventually replaced in commercial and, if you can afford it, home contexts by machines that could control individual needles, instead of depending on a punch card’s repeat—but the machines are still in use in a number of hobbyist workshops (like my own!) and are even still in production (albeit much-reduced).
The knitting machines I own share their punch card dimensions (24 stitches wide) with one of the first punch cards (the Hollerith card, used for the 1890 census, was a 24-column punch card). They’re an important piece of computing history—and crucially, one of the few that isn’t only history because a broad community of people, on- and off-line, are still sharing knowledge on how to hack, restore, and use them.
Punch cards are a fascinating binary data storage format that aren’t just history—they’re still used by knitting machines today! Thanks to the Internet Archive and other collections, we still have access to historic punch cards, but there are some technical challenges to using them in the format they’re stored in. Meet a few folx working on those challenges.
Punch card computation—the good old days, or the bad old days, depending color correction who you talk to—lives firmly in the land of “the old days” for most—a piece of history, with pedagogical and nostalgic benefit—but it’s alive and well in the textile world.
Histories of computing frequently point to the Jacquard loom as the example of the “first” code, used to create fabric in a variety of patterns—like this 1839 commemorative portrait of the Jacquard loom’s inventor, J.M. Jacquard: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002737214/. These looms use punch cards to lift warp threads above or below the weft, allowing for the mechanized creation of non-repeating patterns across the loom. (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_645517)
While the Jacquard loom gets all the attention for being the first code, the punch card knitting machine transitioned from being a Jacquard attachment on lace and knitting machines in industrial textile production to the kind of local, DIY code that a lot of people in textiles interacted with—many of whom were women. By the 1970s, they were used by people knitting for themselves and their families, for take-home piece-work, and in textile factory settings. The punch card machine was eventually replaced in commercial and, if you can afford it, home contexts by machines that could control individual needles, instead of depending on a punch card’s repeat—but the machines are still in use in a number of hobbyist workshops (like my own!) and are even still in production (albeit much-reduced).
The knitting machines I own share their punch card dimensions (24 stitches wide) with one of the first punch cards (the Hollerith card, used for the 1890 census, was a 24-column punch card). They’re an important piece of computing history—and crucially, one of the few that isn’t only history because a broad community of people, on- and off-line, are still sharing knowledge on how to hack, restore, and use them.