“Innovations in history may often be improvements in a given technology – a better way to architect domes, a more efficient steam engine. But the significant ones are new domainings. They are the expressing of a given purpose in a different set of components, as when the provision of power changed from being exprssed in waterwheel technology to being expressed in steam technology.”
Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology, 2009
If you seek the underlying patterns as I do, this is a fascinating meditation, theory, or indeed philosophy of technology. Stay tuned for an in depth review.