It's not just speculative. It's a retrospective on the early mainframe era. The nitty gritty punch card programming was something stereotypically done by middl

It's not just speculative. It's a retrospective on the early mainframe era. The nitty gritty punch card programming was something stereotypically done by middle aged/older women. Many early computers were massive and housed in what could be considered temples in big universities surrounded by gothic architecture. They were expensive to replace and kept around for long periods of time because of how difficult it was to upgrade (some large mainframe systems still exist today for that reason). Mechanical computers like the Babbage difference engine would last a lifetime. The idea of an average Joe spending all day using expensive compute time was insane. Those who focused on them did so for academic reasons, and spent most of their time meditating on computation, math, and the structure of language and meaning.