In 1779, in a village in Leicestershire, England, Ned Ludd broke into a house and "in a fit of insane rage" destroyed two stocking-frames, among the earliest knitting machines used to make hosiery.

Some think Mr. Ludd was a simpleton and the whole thing an accident, but out of a simpleton's anger grew the Luddite movement, an underground group that opposed the emerging technology of the Industrial Revolution.

The movement, many of whose members were textile workers forced out of work by machines, began in Nottingham in 1811 and spread rapidly. Wool and cotton mills were destroyed until the British government suppressed the movement.

"Machine breaking" was made a capital crime and in 1813, 17 men were hanged for it.

During the debate in the House of Lords over the death penalty provision, Lord Byron, the romantic poet, argued against the law.

Several years later, Lord Byron spent a summer of intense conversation with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary, who was working on her novel "Frankenstein," one of the first books that had as a theme the dangers of technology.

Later, Byron's daughter, Lady Ada Lovelace, became a supporter of the English mathematician, philosopher and mechanical engineer Charles Babbage, who in the 1820s attempted and failed to build a computer called the difference engine from brass mechanical parts.

Flash forward to the 1980s when science fiction writers William Gibson and Bruce Sterling wrote a novel called "The Difference Engine," in which they imagined what the world would have been like had Mr. Babbage succeeded.

Mr. Gibson's previous novels, beginning with "Neuromancer," engendered a science fiction genre called cyberpunk, which imagined a dark future of pharmaceutical and surgical body and mind enhancements, a world ruled by vast corporations and artificial intelligences -- the kind of future a Luddite might imagine.

In fact, science fiction of the post-Hiroshima 1950s and '60s had pervasive themes of technology gone awry.

Novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote an excellent essay on all this in 1984 (no coincidence, I assume), which is available on his Web site at www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html

These days, we no longer feel the need to destroy hosiery machines, but there still are those who feel threatened by technology. So-called neo-Luddites feel that technology is dehumanizing and that it destroys cultures and the environment. There have even been a few violent neo-Luddites, such as Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

But Mr. Pynchon claims in his essay that computers do not inspire the same Luddism as nuclear weapons or powered looms.

"Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead," he says.

It's easy to fear the blinking mainframe in the air-conditioned room (the WOPR in the movie "War Games"). It is a little harder to fear the Mac in your living room. Be frustrated with it? Yes. Want to smash it in a fit of insane rage? Yes. Fear it? No.

But the future holds many other strange and wondrous things for Luddites to fear -- genetic engineering, biotechnology, robots, space travel.

So there will always be a stocking frame out there to be destroyed.