Tumblr Thread Seamlessly Weaves Knitting And Science

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Eric Lund
Nov 2, 2021 9:00 AM EDT

It's not surprising that Tumblr would find a way to highlight the role of threadwork into computing and space travel when you consider this bonkers thread on the fiery drama of the knitting community. Again, it's not like little old ladies sewing things is the first thing one thinks of when considering math and hard science, but by golly if it ain't part of it.

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  • 01
    Font - eldritchscholar So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that: 1) Binary files are 1s and Os 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 peopl
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  • 02
    Product - max-vandenburg 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. TUVEDY This is
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  • 03
    Font - 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:
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  • 04
    Brown - 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,
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  • 05
    Rectangle - .... .. .. .. . 00 .... .. 2 ... . 0... . . . ●.. .. .. .. .. . 000. • .. .... .. ... . .. . ....) .... .. ... .. . 0 ON . .. .. . ...e KO. ... . .. • .. 0... .. and as you can see, the holes (or O'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.
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  • 06
    Product - 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.
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  • 07
    Wood - isnerdy 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:
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  • 08
    Product - 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: W13
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  • 09
    Gesture - 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:
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  • 10
    Engineering - 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. dollsahoy (little old ladies sewed the space suits, too) butts-for-days Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for "little old lady memory."
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  • 11
    Building - costumersupportdept I mean let's also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the "weaver yelling at Draw Boy" technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles "raise these and
    via NobodyKnowsImGayla
  • 12
    Font - ALSO, it's not just "little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits," it's "the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed." Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn't use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were a
    via NobodyKnowsImGayla

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wtf computers thread history tumblr knitting ridiculous science math weird
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