I am the Kat that Walks By Itself

A song from "My Fair Lady" came up on the randomplay. Professor Higgins, male chauvinist, is one of those fictional characters that I would like to give a good talking to about his sexism. But the problem with time travel, is that one doesn't have the same context; I started pondering how one could explain "Computer Programmer" to someone from before computers were invented... or whether it wasn't worth trying.

First attempt:

Computers are machines that weave numbers. You might think that's pretty useless, but you can use numbers to represent anything. Words. Pictures. Sounds. The machine can translate back and forth between the numbers and what they represent. Which means that you can manipulate them: store them, retrieve them, change them, transmit them over telegraph wires.

... and at this point my brain fails me.