External timing files allow the writing of technology-independent (timing) models.
But Sir Arthur, like Ms Cornwell, would be aware of the danger in this writing: the use of technology becomes so overpowering that it destroys the human element.
Visiting a large conference or trade show can be an unpleasant experience, as Babbage can attest from many years of writing about technology.
It is an example, they write, of how "technology companies have outstripped the regulators, but also their complicated relationship with their adoring customers".
However, he added, the body did not think the threat from the attack was serious enough to require a re-write of the technology's security.
I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will evolve, this way or that.
"It was the perfect field," I wrote, "the implementation of technology to treat a widespread problem like world hunger".
In the future when somebody writes the history of technology, 2004 will be seen as the year Wi-Fi began to storm the corporate gates.
If I were to write my laws of technology I think one of them would say something like "Any technology revolution that doesn't work imperfectly doesn't work".
Sarah Shearman is a freelance journalist writing about the intersection of technology, innovation and culture.
She has been writing about the intersection of technology with media, entertainment and sports since the days before the Web.
