Undictionary:Ada-ware

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Ada-ware

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English

Noun

Ada-ware (uncountable)

1. (computing science) An early application created by Ada Countess of Lovelace, which ran on Charles Babbage's original mechanical Babbage Difference Engine to remove small crumbs of pink luncheon meat which had been left to clog the gears. The original culprit behind all these tiny pieces of spam was believed to be a wealthy Nigerian prince attempting to use this primitive first computer to search for a lonely Russian mail-order bride. The mechanical computing fad soon ended, only to be briefly revived in wartime, when Alvin Turing devised a test at Bletchley Park to crack the Enigma of whether a robot or merely a thousand monkeys with typewriters were sending gibberish messages over the ether. Ada-ware is believed to finally have become obsolete after the military-specification Ada compiler was abandoned in favour of C++ in the 1990s.