I am with you in this general rant. However, in this particular case, the delay was a consequence of the introduction of computers and asynchronous telecommunic

I am with you in this general rant. However, in this particular case, the delay was a consequence of the introduction of computers and asynchronous telecommunications. I was not around at that time but it seems nobody anticipated that putting all the logic in a computer would result in worst performances as opposed to older designs were computations were essentially carried out by relays wired together. Relay logics worked in parallel, when CPU have to do things sequentially. Fun fact: some operators around the world refuse to use computer-based systems for some applications because of that, and they are getting a strong support now because of cyber security threats. A relay is hard to hack :D