Many of Babbage's ideas were before his time. In fact, the ideas he thought possible didn't come true for quite a while. To think that what we can only imagine now might be actuality in the future. Babbage, at one point tried to make "a locomotive that lays down it's own railway," (Gleik 114). There are, as I saw in Japan, trains that are calculated carefully to navigate multiple tracks carrying multiple trains, all through computer run track controls. The information is calculated through the computer faster than a human calculator dreamed in Babbage's time.
Communication and information through technology is, in this day and age, essential, and so built into our frame work we hardly notice it, and take it for granted. In fact, Information technology is the use of computers and software in processing information. It was made clear in Gleick's reading there needed to be better computers than humans themselves, for it was practically insufficient to spend so much time and mental capacity on such things. This is where automation comes in.
Automation is technology meant to facilitate ease of use, such as automated industrial jobs, the alphabetize function on your computer, and many more. To think that Babbage had the idea of automation in information technology so early is impressive. Such things, nowadays, as said earlier, are taken for granted. We don't think twice about needing our computers for our homework, listening to our music while running on an elliptical in an air-conditioned gym, but all of that technology is automation.
http://jobsearchtech.about.com/od/careersintechnology/p/ITDefinition.htm
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