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The Last of the Punch Card Programmers
Peter Cus writes "Cluny Lace, an English lacemaking manufacturer, has reverted to 19th-Century Leavers machines in order to stay competitive. These 19th-Century machines use Jacquard punch cards. Ian Elm, thought to be the last of the card punchers, says young people don't want factory work: 'Younger people coming into a trade want a guarantee of a career out of it, and this is so uncertain.'"
What we really need is for people to RTFA before they comment.
The article mentions exactly that - they say that the modern computer driven machines don't produce lace of the same quality.
I don't doubt that we could build modern machines to emulate the Victorian ones perfectly, but it's quite possibly cheaper to just keep the old ones going for such a niche product, especially when the current computer-driven machines apparently make lace 'good enough' for most purposes.
Punch cards can be a pretty useful educational tool. In the 1980s I had an intro to computer science class where we had to write our first programming assignment in fortran(*) using punch cards. Second and subsequent assignments would use terminals. The professor explained that doing so was terribly obsolete but that this experience would help us understand why some computer languages (fortran in particular) and some operating systems (including unix) are the way they are. He added that the deck of blank punch cards we would have to buy would also provide us with plenty of book marks for the rest of our years in college.
(*) Fortran was only used in this intro computer science class. This class was required for many engineering and science majors who were more likely to use fortran than computer science majors. Unexpectedly in the mid 1990s I actually used fortran as my company was contracted to move some chemistry software from mainframes to personal computers.
The evidence is generally for faster/cheaper.
Indeed. Business 101 teaches us that "cheap shit drives good shit out of the market" in a race to the bottom. Business 201 modifies this slightly by noting that statutory regulations and standards usually place a lower bound on how shitty stuff can get. MBA courses subsequently add an "unfortunately" to the latter observation.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Modern machines are now being built that are run directly from computers, but I'd say, given that these are huge expensive machines that are often resold and moved to new locations rather than bought new, the majority still run on paper tape.
The issue of quality isn't directly related to the machines being computer-driven. The quality depends on the care of the designer, the 'stitch count' or density, and quality of thread, etc. As with many manufactured goods, you can get lace for less money if you accept lower quality. No surprise there.
I assume the computer-driven machines would let an operator change the stitch count. These days, there are few people (in the West anyway) who know how to create a 'punching' as it is called, and fewer who are interested in learning. Strangely, the remnant of my father's business is just starting to get orders from Asia, so maybe 'Free Trade' is finally coming around to the point where manufacturing costs in the US are competitive with Asia in this regard, but there really is no one ready or willing to meet the manufacturing demand if it ever really comes back. You can probably ditto this sentiment for US shoe manufacturing, furniture, etc.
I well remember punching decks of cards for my Computer Science classes, then "submitting" them to the guy behind the bank-teller window in the Mainframe Suite and waiting for my job to finish so another guy could hand me a thick stack of folded paper from the LinePrinter so I could see if my program had worked. I always got a laugh out of waiting an hour or more for my printout, which proclaimed on the second page that I had consumed .00058 seconds of CPU time -- talk about a responsive user interface!
John Leavers invented those machines in 1812 and they're still in use. If two hundred years isn't job security, I don't know what is!