So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:
1) Binary files are 1s and 0s
2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches
You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…
You can knit Doom.
However, after crunching some more numbers:
The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…
3322 square feet
Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.
Hi fun fact!!
The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:
Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.
This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer.
But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine.
Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:
But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!
Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,
and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.
tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.
@we-are-threadmage
Someone port Doom to a blanket
I really love tumblr for this 🙌
It goes beyond this. Every computer out there has memory. The kind of memory you might call RAM. The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory. It looked like this:
Wires going through magnets. This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily. Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1. Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:
You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is. But these are also extreme close-ups. Here’s the scale of the individual cores:
The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers. Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.
And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon. This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive. It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.
Don’t underestimate the impact craft has had on our culture
I want to expand the story with: THE JACQUARD LOOM.
No, wait, that’s not a loom! That’s a photograph of Joseph Marie Jacquard. No wait, that’s not a photo of Joseph Jacquard, that’s a portrait of Jacquard he wove on a Jacquard Loom in 1839!
It’s the woven portrait of Jacquard once owned by Charles Babbage!
This one’s a jacquard loom. I got it now.
You’ll notice the fabric being displayed at the side has a “brocade” look (I’m not gonna go deep into fabric, but you’ve seen this look in every period drama.) This look has always been painfully, painfully Cool in Europe, because brocades produced by skilled weavers Asia and the Middle East were in limited supply.
Those brocades were produced on looms like this puppy:
Yes, that is a second person inside the machine, serving as a human computer to track the pattern. While wooden cards with holes were used since antiquity in China to help with simpler brocades, keep in mind that this loom was already perfect for master weavers—if weaving took intense skill, then they controlled supply and made bank. They didn’t develop a machine to replace human calculators because they weren’t motivated to.
Jacquard, meanwhile, would have been highly motivated to build something that could mass-produce to flood the European market. The loom head he introduced in 1804-5 drew on Bouchon’s 1725 attempt, which used cards but still needed that second human calculator. The jacquard loom head uses a row of hooks, which move across cards with a pattern of holes: where there’s a hole, the hook can drop through and pick up the warp thread, moving it to the opposite side of the weft; where there’s no hole, the warp stays where it is, creating a two-tone design.
The beautiful knitting machine max-vandenburg is showin’ off up there has a pedigree going back to 1589. At that point it was used for single-color knitting, most importantly the unspeakably huge economic demand for the production of basic necessities like stockings. In the 1800s, as the jacquard loom head spread, machine knitters quickly developed their own punch cards to reproduce knitting’s own traditionally lusted-after Luxury: colorwork.
Let’s acknowledge here it’s a little odd talking about textile machines because I’m simultaneously going to call textiles “women’s industries” and saying all these machines were invented by men.
Partly, this is because The Women’s Industries have always been seen in multiple lights. In medieval Europe textiles were both luxuries created by “master artisans” who underwent intensive formal training in craft guilds, with enormous economic value, and necessities created by women everywhere, with…enormous economic value.
“Cottage industry” is an unfortunate term, but try to keep in mind that throughout history people have needed warm clothes (and hot food, and clean laundry, and home medicines and candles and soap.) In Europe and colonial North America, outside of the largest cities with their craft guilds, women made, bought, and sold all those things. Women’s choices have always been the fundamental driver of economic activity; what’s changed over the centuries is that we’ve moved from a woman-to-woman marketplace largely conducted between homes to an industrial company-to-customer (largely: women customers) model. Your understanding of economics, history, and gender is fundamentally flawed if you believe that women didn’t work just because the amount of much cash (or a non-monetary, more immediately valuable payment like ‘food’) colonial housewives earned selling soap isn’t part of The Historical Record. Those historic maketplaces of the Women’s Economy were always vibrant, significant, and huge.
Let’s also acknowledge any part of ourselves that wants to think, “well, the peasant women were just making charming rustic stuff, the men with formal training developed the fancy patterns that inspired the knitting machine.” That part has been programmed with some insidious shit, so let’s take it on a trip to Muhu Island.
Or…Fair Isle. Or anywhere rocky and cold where men went out to fish and a bunch of women were “sitting around at home” determined to 1) make everything needed to survive 2) SHOW THE HELL OFF.
The intense intellect, concentration, and calculation it takes to create textiles WAS once recognized. Mechanization has done wonders and women have absolutely been directly and massively involved in more modern developments, at the core of aerospace, engineering, camera design and film editing, both because of their own particular talents and because Everyone Knows if it’s huge and repetitive and kinda dull you pawn it off on a woman whose delicate lady hands just instinctively know how to craft. But it is unfortunate that the mass-production of textiles has helped our culture devalue and mis-imagine historical women’s skill. There is a reason that textile arts were once so closely linked to magic; in Northern Europe there was a belief that a woman even whispering someone’s name while she wove or knit was enough to lay a curse, and she might be criminally charged. People knew that shit was serious business.
My point is yes, a man designed the first knitting machine, because he had the insight and materials to adapt a body of skilled knowledge largely developed by women. A man built the Jacquard loom based on another vast body of weaving knowledge.
Babbage’s Number Cards were not a pure, precious, sprung-from-the-forehead-of-Zeus inspiration. They were an insightful use of knowledge rooted in history.
Math has never belonged to men. Computers never belonged to men. “The economy” does not belong to men.
