A Pascaline opened up so you can observe the gears and cylinders which rotated to display the numerical result

Just a few years after Pascal, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (co-inventor with Newton of calculus) managed to build a four-function (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) calculator that he called the stepped reckoner because, instead of gears, it employed fluted drums having ten flutes arranged around their circumference in a stair-step fashion. Although the stepped reckoner employed the decimal number system (each drum had 10 flutes), Leibniz was the first to advocate use of the binary number system which is fundamental to the operation of modern computers. Leibniz is considered one of the greatest of the philosophers but he died poor and alone.

Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner (have you ever heard " calculating" referred to as " reckoning"?)

In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendents of these punched cards have been in use ever since (remember the " hanging chad" from the Florida presidential ballots of the year 2000?).

Jacquard's Loom showing the threads and the punched cards

By selecting particular cards for Jacquard's loom you defined the woven pattern [photo © 2002 IEEE]