You seem to have been reading a very different article than what I read, or else you are reading it with a desire to be permissive of Wolfram's overt self-promotion. The issue is not with innocuous asides, like the comment about his school, but with all the references comparing his personal work to that of Babbage and Lovelace.

For example, Wolfram writes

> In apparent resonance with some of my own work 150 years later, he talks about the relationship between mechanical processes, natural laws and free will.

in which the phrase 'my own work' is an embedded link to the table of contents of NKS. He also writes

> The one big exception to this was his almost-50-year persistence in trying to automate the process of computation.
I myself have shared a modern version of this very goal in my own life (…, Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, Wolfram Language, …)—though so far only for 40 years. I am fortunate to have lived in a time when ambient technology made this much easier to achieve, but in every large project I have done it has still taken a certain singlemindedness and gritty tenacity—as well as leadership—to actually get it finished.

in which the terms 'Mathematica', 'Wolfram|Alpha', and 'Wolfram Language' are links to those respective proprietary projects of Wolfram's -- thus clearly deviating from the notion of a neutral historical account and drifting into self-aggrandizing advertisement for a set of modern commercial products that are truly unrelated to the content of the essay (Lovelace's contributions).

Wolfram continues with this kind of stuff, at one point saying:

> There was still, though, a suspicion that perhaps some other way of making computers might lead to a different form of computation. And it actually wasn’t until the 1980s that universal computation became widely accepted as a robust notion. And by that time, something new was emerging—notably through work I was doing: that universal computation was not only something that’s possible, but that it’s actually common.

>And what we now know (embodied for example in my Principle of Computational Equivalence) is that beyond a low threshold a very wide range of systems—even of very simple construction—are actually capable of universal computation.

in which the phrase 'Principle of Computational Equivalence' is an embedded link to chapter 12 of NKS. Once again, what on earth is this doing in a historical essay? It's not relevant to the story of Babbage and Lovelace. What he says about universal computation is highly debateable (it was certainly recognized within professional computer science long before the 80s, and indeed as many criticisms of NKS point out, even Wolfram's own supposedly important result was mostly a proof developed by another person and was largely a minor extension of widely published work already known to the community at the time).

These are not "small asides personal notes" as you write it. These are structural elements of the whole essay. Even when he is talking about a topic you'd think could not be perverted by self-aggrandizing marketing, we still manages to shoehorn in something irrelevant about Mathematica:

> Today, of course, it’s instantaneous to do the computation in the Wolfram Language:

What? The instantaneousness of it is not related to the historical article at all -- it's just a way to shoehorn in Mathematica. And then just below that:

> And, as it happens, a few years ago, just to show off new algorithms, we even computed 10 million of them.

where the part 'computed 10 million of them' is an embedded link to a press release article from the Mathematica blog.

You seem to have glossed over the article and chosen two extremely innocuous examples (the bit about his former school and the bit about logarithm tables). Those two asides are not representative of the sweepingly self-aggrandizing and self-promotional items that are all over the article.

These parts by Wolfram do a disservice to Lovelace and Babbage in as much as they greatly weaken the accuracy and relevance of the overall piece, and add noise that the reader must be careful to navigate around if she wants to enjoy the historical bits.

At any rate, I don't think I am expressing an "eye to be irritated" as you put it. It's all just plain to see in Wolfram's writing.