Many of the large, open warehouse style rooms within the factory were used to store bundles of these thick perforated paper sheets of cards, which were loosely strung together in rows of four. The holes within the punched cards essentially served as a primitive computer language, a method for recording the input and export of data. The cards were fed through the lace looms and controlled the pattern of the lace weave. The punched cards could easily be changed and swapped out, allowing a single loom to create seemingly any pattern.