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Knitting machine punch cards are a living form of computing history. 🧶💾 In “Punch Card Knitting,” Nichole Misako Nomura explores how these physical forms of binary code are still used today, and the challenges of preserving them for future use. 📚 Read “Punch Card Knitting” in VANISHING CULTURE from the Internet Archive. 📖 Download FREE: https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026/page/144/ 🧵

What can knitting machines teach us about the history of computing? "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 "Knitting punch cards are an important part of any feminist computing history, and surprisingly resilient." Quote graphic on a dark greenish-black background with light gray text and pixel-pattern bars above and below. Attribution reads Nichole Misako Nomura, Digital Humanities Scholar, with the Vanishing Culture logo. "Working with knitting machine punch cards reminds me that the cloud is a metaphor, and lets me own and manipulate my code in a way I find both challenging and creatively liberating." Quote graphic on a light gray background with a dark green vertical bar and pixel-pattern accents on the left edge. Attribution reads Nichole Misako Nomura, Digital Humanities Scholar, with the Vanishing Culture logo.