[scetron]

A lot of these knitting machines at some point upgraded to disks instead of punch cards, or had the ability to add them later. Some of them can use a data cable to a computer to control them.

There's also this really cool kind of hack called All Yarns Are Beautiful which switches out the knitting machine's computer with an Arduino with a custom hat to drive to the mechanism that controls the needles.

https://ayab-knitting.com/