Years ago, a company that I worked for had a huge boulder in the parking lot area that had simply been built around. At some point, facilities decided they were going to remove the boulder. Employees printed up some tee shirts that said "Save the BFR". Because, you know, it was a big rock.
I worked at the Roseville, MN, plant in the early 80's as a CPU designer. 100K ECL. The machine was the Integrated Scientific Processor, an attached processor that could be added to an 1100/80 system. Max configuration was 4 CPU's (model 1100/84) plus 2 ISPs. The ISP was a vector processor that had approximately the same peak performance of a CRAY-1, and higher average performance. (In part because we handled the "short vector problem" more elegantly, so the last few elements of every long vector didn't pay a time penalty for dealing with the tail end of a long vector. There were a few other architectural tweaks that contributed.)
The program was not a success. Reason 1: Oil prices came way down, so seismic data reduction and reservoir simulation markets dried up, Reason 2: Univac management was timid and slow at decision-making and starved the project. Had we been properly resourced and delivered a couple years earlier, things could have been different.
This does happen. I also once worked on a destination-dispatch elevator system installed in a high-end condo building (high-end, as in concierge and parking valet for residents). Anyway... the resident's key card would of course automatically call a cab to take them to their unit's floor, but also the security system had entries for things like "dog owner" and "allergic to dogs" so that the DD system would never schedule them together for the same cab.
It's pretty much throughput. The cap-ex of a single cab swamps any other cost, so the only way to reduce total number of cabs is optimizing for throughput.
One other thing to add: It isn't the elevator scheduling software being obtuse, that software gets a huge amount of thought. But elevators are expensive, and building owners do not over-spend on a whim. Typically, they have just enough cabs (if that) to handle the expected load.
Not only that but different countries have code regimes that make more elevators especially expensive. See how building codes in the US basically ensure there are only two real manufacturers in the market vs a healthy ecosystem in others: https://youtu.be/Or1_qVdekYM
I have done several third-party elevator integrations (software that talks to the elevator controller) for coordinating other equipment with the elevator. One thing that always struck me once I had full visibility into the location and motion of all the elevator cabs is how busily they are scheduled. Waiting in the elevator lobby for a cab seems to take forever, but viewed from the dispatch side, it is a flurry of activity and cabs are rarely idle during any hours the building is normally occupied. It is easy to nerd out just watching the status panel.
Another thing I learned: If an elevator mechanic says: "I'll meet you first thing in the morning." He means something like 4:00AM. They want to get in and out before people start arriving to start their day.
Some older buildings in SF have the old school elevator panels in the lobby, with big vertical displays of all the floors, and a moving needle for each cab, and lights where there were calls. Big beautiful brass monster, polished to a shine. I think it was the flood building. Used to love watching it on my way up
Even oddly more pedantically, that's the operand stack, not to be confused with the separate return stack. >R and R> move values between the two stacks.
On the other hand, PostScript also has a dictionary stack, which you can use to implement a Smalltalk-like object oriented programming system. And its data types and executable code are basically polymorphic homoiconic JSON (like Lisp), not raw untyped bytes like FORTH.
Almost true. For many plants, a hybrid is naturally unstable, and can often be stabilized with one extra cross. (But isn't, as it serves as intellectual property protection for the seed company.) But some plants, soy beans being a biggest cash-crop example, can not be bred to be unstable. (See my comment above about Monsanto Roundup-Ready beans.)
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