Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752 – 1834) was a French weaver and merchant from Lyon. He invented the Jacquard loom, a device that simplified the process of weaving complex patterns. The loom was controlled by punched cards, where the presence or absence of a hole dictated the pattern of the weave.
This was the first machine to be programmed using a binary system of information storage and retrieval. His remarkable punched-card concept was a direct inspiration for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and became a foundational technology for early computing.