The confusion of ideas here is understandable IMO: people assume everything is atomic. Databases of course famously have ACID guarantees. But it's easy for people to assume copying is also an atomic operation. Honestly if someone works too much with databases and not enough with filesystems it's a mistake easily made.

> I cannot rightly apprehend the confusion of ideas

I see you are a man of culture.

Charles Babbage is smart, but either he lacks empathy to understand other people or he's just saying that deliberately for comedic effect.

It was early days... very early days. He didn't have the benefit of trying to help his (metaphorical) grandparents get their emails or worked under a manager who thinks 2023-era ChatGPT is only slightly less reliable than the Standard Model of Physics, if not slightly more.

Oh he definitely lacked empathy.

But things haven't improved much. Today we have "prompt engineers" whose only job is to input the right question in order to get the right answer.