I think "HN's world" is kind of large, it doesn't only consist of web developers. The reason these were made in hardware is there were no software-driven SCADAs

I think "HN's world" is kind of large, it doesn't only consist of web developers. The reason these were made in hardware is there were no software-driven SCADAs and cheap and abundant large displays back then, or at least they were in their infancy. >starting up new things and experiments within months >you don't know what you're building yet, whether it will work, and if it will still exist next year. That's exactly how fast things moved when these control rooms were designed, though. Even in the Soviet industries which were generally inflexible and optimized for 5-year iterations, there was constant experimentation and plenty of lean and mean engineering organizations. The reason you're perceiving industrial equipment design as slow is that you live in an entirely different era. It doesn't have to be slow, and it wasn't always like that.