Their central metaphor is a loom.

They say, Upon this loom, I weave my life.

There is a massive loom, on which Dad's latest wife is working on a new toga.

Just so he could get the part as the Banana Guy in the Fruit of The Loom Campaign.

It was capable of iteration, conditional branching and parallel processing, and it was programmable using punched cards, an idea Babbage took from Jacquard's loom.

I built a loom in a one car garage with postal tubes and dowels, and things I could find in a hardware store, and I started weaving this optical fiber, which became a tapestry, 5 feet wide and 50 feet long.

Now, the reason they used punch cards was that Jacquard, in France, had created the Jacquard loom, which was weaving these incredible patterns controlled by punch cards, so he was just repurposing the technology of the day, and like everything else he did, he's using the technology of his era, so 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, cogs, steam, mechanical devices.