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Loveless and Baggage

From a proposed take-off on the burlesque British history 1066 and All That tentatively titled 6502 and All That:

Ada Loveless invented female programmers. Before her time, while there were no programmers, they were all male. This was a Good Thing, however, because during WWII all computers were female. In America, many of these computers were wax, while in Britain they were usually wrens found belching in the park.

Ada Loveless was the daughter of the famous author and entrepreneur H. P. Loveless. When he was not writing horror stories, H. P. Loveless was busy founding HP, a Packard dealership and garage just off Woz Way in Silicon Valley. HP was famous for getting its Way. Anyone who prevented HP from getting its Way was forced to donate several hours polishing the cars backwards. This was known as Reverse Polish Donation, and was a Good Thing.

Ada Loveless was British, and so of course was close friends with Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Charles Bronson (of the literary Bronson sisters, Charles, Emily, and Ann), and Charles Baggage, an engineer on the Jacquard–Turing Line.

Baggage was famous for not inventing the computer, which he didn’t do twice. He didn’t invent the computer so well that today he has a museum named after him, called the Computer History Museum. He also invented steampunk and talking about technology at cocktail parties, so not inventing the computer was perhaps a Good Thing.

Ada Loveless later joined the Navy and studied martial arts, at which time she was known as Grasshopper, or sometimes Admiral Grasshopper.

By Michael Swaine

Michael Swaine was part of the launch team for the first personal computer newsweekly, InfoWorld. He co-authored Fire in the Valley, the seminal computer history book on which the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley was based. He was the long-time editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal and of PragPub and has launched, written for, and edited numerous other magazines.

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