Textile patterns are one of the earliest commercial computer uses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine

The Jacquard machine (French: [ʒakaʁ]) is a device fitted to a loom that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with such complex patterns as brocade, damask and matelassé.[3] The resulting ensemble of the loom and Jacquard machine is then called a Jacquard loom. The machine was patented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804,[4][5][6][7] based on earlier inventions by the Frenchmen Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean Baptiste Falcon (1728), and Jacques Vaucanson (1740).[8] The machine was controlled by a "chain of cards"; a number of punched cards laced together into a continuous sequence.[9] Multiple rows of holes were punched on each card, with one complete card corresponding to one row of the design.

The Jacquard head used replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations. It is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware.[26] The ability to change the pattern of the loom's weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to the development of computer programming and data entry.

This meme looks legitimately ancient

This… never happened, did it?

it's a good story, and it makes good feelings happen in your body when you believe it in good faith, so it might as well be true even if it isn't

No doubt grandmom figured out Excel on her own.

I do see people online talking about using Excel to do knitting patterns.

I don't know if his grandma just "accidentally opened it"---maybe she heard about it from someone else---but it does look like it's a thing.

I'd probably suggest using a pixel art app or something instead, but, well, Microsoft Office is pretty much everywhere.

Reddit, 5 months ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/knitting/comments/1rz5udj/creating_patterns_on_excel/

Knitting website, 15 years ago:

https://anniebeeknits.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/charting-in-excel/

Charting knitting patterns in Excel

I do all my charting in Excel, personally. Mostly this is sheer laziness, since it’s the software I know best from my day job, and I can’t be bothered to purchase or learn another program! Anyway, I had some tips and tricks to share with Glenna, and I promised I’d make her a proper tutorial. I’m hardly an expert (at Excel OR at designing) but maybe this will prompt some others to share their tips and tricks too. Here goes!

Knitting website, 16 years back:

https://www.chemknits.com/2010/01/how-to-make-knitting-chart-in-excel_9394.html?m=1

How to Make a Knitting Chart in Excel (Part 1 - Setting up the Chart)

A comment on my peptide beer cozy pattern page inquired how I was able to make the chart look so good. You can go to an office supply store and purchase graph paper. You can download graph paper online. But how can you easily make a chart of your own design and share it on the web? In this article, I will give you a tutorial for using Microsoft Excel to generate your knitting charts. In Part 2, I will discuss how to draw your chart and in Part 3, how to save and share your chart.

It looks like people have developed a set of conventions using Excel functionality to colorize cells based on the characters in them, so they can rapidly input patterns using the keyboard.

Honestly, weirder things have been accomplished with spreadsheets

Kinda oddly specific tho, tbf. One can have faith.

Well, why would they buy the office pack, and resizing all the column like this is not really that intuitive
But it's a feel good story, so I chose to believe!

Maybe this is his Grandma https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J8k3d9C1pw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J8k3d9C1pw

Excel would be better than a pixel app because each cell is already a coordinate.

Wake me up when the knitting pattern can play doom.

https://youtu.be/UrgvBYZwS9k

I don't know about knitting but I wonder if the numbering on the cells helps with knitting so Excel is superior.

There's no way grandma would figure out how to turn every cell into a square.

i can see my nana doing this. she figured out zelda on the nes alone including new game + differences. she was big into knit patterns. i tend to knit with words “(rs)k2 p11 k2 repeat until end” vs visual.

Wait until you hear about Inkscape. Next level knitting patterns are just around the corner.

I don't think they are saying no one has ever used excel to make knitting patterns, but there is also no way anyone just opens Excel, having no idea what it is or what it does and 1) immediately recognizes how to use it for knitting patterns; and 2) assumes that is the intended and only use of the software.

Figuring out how to play zelda is more like figuring out how to use Excel to make a budget spreadsheet. This would be more like discovering zelda and using it to produce music tracks exclusively and thinking that is the entire point of zelda.