Paradise Mill is a former silk mill in Macclesfield. It is now part of the town’s Silk Museum. It holds 26 Jacquard Looms; possibly the largest collection of such looms in the world [unless Jacquard’s home town of Lyon has more].
Macclesfield was a silk processing town. One hundred and twenty mills and dye house were built in there between 1740 and 1940. There were 600 garreted houses [houses where the top floor had been fitted with extra large windows and was used as a workshop].
Paradise Mill was operated by the firm of Cartwright & Sheldon from 1912. The looms were restored in the early 1980s and the mill and museum opened to the public. Tours of the mill are organised by the Silk Museum and conducted by a very knowledgeable guide. [The museum itself is well worth a visit. It has a lot of interesting exhibits and is very well presented.]
Jacquard Looms transformed the silk industry. They are also considered an important part of the history of computing because they incorporate two important ideas.
1. The stored program concept – the program to operate a loom was stored separately from the machine in a set of punched cards.
2. Punched cards – silk weaving programs were stored in punched cards. Punched cards were later used extensively to store programs and data both in punched card processing and in early electronic computing.
You can read more about this here. Link
Awesome collection
https://trackton.in/