This is not an engraving. It is silk — a portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard woven on the loom he invented, from roughly 24,000 punched cards. Charles Babbage kept a copy in his drawing room to show visitors what a machine that reads cards could do; the cards became the computer’s first memory. The loom did not replace the weaver. It changed what a weaver could hold in mind.

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Ciani spent a decade mastering the Buchla synthesizer — an instrument most people treated as a laboratory — and then wrote this: seven pieces shaped like the sea. Machine music with a pulse. She is still performing on the same instrument, forty years on.

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“But lo! men have become
the tools of their tools.”

Walden, 1854. Thoreau was not against tools — he surveyed land with instruments and improved his family’s pencil-making process himself. The line is a question of direction: who serves whom. Worth asking of every app on your phone, one at a time.

“As We May Think,” 1945: Bush imagined the memex, a desk holding a library, with trails of association linking page to page. Written before the first computers, it reads like a description of the machine in your pocket — by someone who assumed it would serve memory, not consume attention.

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That is the whole letter. Next Monday, another.

The Daily · San Diego Institute of Technology