Babbage = Victorian programmer, Novell = Victorian (Mormon) software company. Well, it's not a great allusion as Babbage was more of a hardware person and his programming pal Ada (Byron's daughter) was actually female. She shares with Bill Gates the achievement of having written a non-trivial program without the computer to run it on, though seems to have made less money out of it. (Though there's probably a steampunk 19th century Microsoft novel in there somewhere.)