You may have admired the beautiful and colorful linens mostly from France and Belgium that grace tables in magazines and elegant dinner tables. They are likely jacquard fabric. But what is Jacquard, or rather who was he?
The late 18th century saw the industrial revolution replace cottage industries.
In the textile industry looms and weaving machines were introduced to mass produce large quantities of fabric. But the new machines could not compete with skilled manual workers to weave cloth with complex pattern. The Jacquard Loom provided a solution to this problem. see following
Joseph Marie Jacquard, invented its eponymous loom in 1801.  The key idea was to control the action of the weaving process by coding the pattern to be depicted as a group of holes “punched” into a sequence of pasteboard card. Each card contained the same number of rows and columns, the presence or absence of a hole was detected mechanically and used to determine the actions of the loom. By combining a “tape” of cards together the Jacquard loom was able to weave (and reproduce) patterns of great complexity. Jacquard's invention of the punched card was the forefather of mechanical music instruments and computing machinery utilizing his punch card concept.