THE FUTURE LOOMS: WEAVING WOMEN AND CYBERNETICS
THE FUTURE LOOMS: WEAVING WOMEN AND CYBERNETICS SADIE PLANT 'The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics' an essay by Sadie Plant, draws a fascinating connection between weaving strings into textiles and data into software. Plant looks at the history of the first computer, based on the electric loom, and how the practices of working with them are more alike than it seems. Her fascination with Ada Lovelace, the first woman associated with the development of computing, is also transparent. If women's history is so interlaced with that of weaving, does that mean that women were born to be programmers?
Beginning with a passage from a novel: The woman brushed aside her veil, with a swift gesture of habit, and Mallory caught his first proper glimpse of her face. She was Ada Byron, the daughter of the Prime Minister. Lady Byron, the Queen of Engines. (Gibson and Sterling, 1990: 89) Ada was not really Ada Byron, but Ada Lovelace, and her father was never Prime Minister: these are the fictions of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, whose book The Difference Engine sets its tale in a Victorian England in which the software she designed was already running; a country in which the Luddites were defeated, a poet was Prime Minister, and Ada Lovelace still bore her maiden name. And one still grander: Queen of Engines. Moreover she was still alive. Set in the mid-1850s, the novel takes her into a middle-age she never saw: the real Ada died in 1852 while she was still in her thirties. Ill for much of her life with unspecified disorders, she was eventually diagnosed as
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