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Ah, but it's not always done for comfort optimization.

Older electrical meters weren't all that accurate, especially for larger systems - that's true even today. They're analog as an only option of measurement due to incredible amounts of power going through them (too noisy for hall effect sensors). Large buildings are reactive loads to the grid, almost like an inductor. Anyhow, older meters picked up velocity for usage calculations.

Some A/C controllers carefully modeled how fast the power meters accelerated as an instrument, then used that information against them, throttling and ramping power use to slow the measurements down, basically causing under-metering.

Saved USPS millions a year in power bills.

BTW, I wasn't against the idea of a right-sized approach, or against your previous work. Very much in favor of both those things. Your work obviously did very well. So did this automation 30 years ago. My whole original remark is about a temporal dimension, which is why I brought up the lights to anchor them to today.

Back then, you could do things more freely with less capable and available hardware. Different environment. Concept of computers was scratching the surface of what they could do for us, and people didn't have a notion of liabilities. And yes, the student didn't install the HVAC systems, but how did tele-operated harwdware interface with it? They didn't have echo dots and knockoff power plugs back then.

Today, you have all that available hardware but can't realistically do things as freely. Suffice it to say that the environment has clammed up on all fronts for an amateur to enter an industry. In some cases rightfully so (only experts for surgeries, plumbing and wiring for me please). In others, egregiously wrong barriers. For example, commonly the first thing that happens in a public institution or agency is that the losing bidder files FOIA requests trying to litigate why their solution was passed up and by whom, including copies of correspondence between them. Imagine having to deal with that dimension.

Back to traffic lights: for something so rudimentary yet so vital, it costs millions of dollars for a handful of intersections, and they're everywhere. Nearly a prime candidate for a four raspberry pi solution, right? You'd think someone would have attempted it.

Rhetorical question: were you a licensed CPP, CPA or an actuary when you were a temp in your secondary education unit? That's literally my point.

Yes, these things can all be done by amateurs. By tinkerers. We all here know it. We've done it. You've done it. Simple devices with telemetry and some logic. Simple programs that do complex things in the aggregate. Take it to your back yard, and either one of us or a highschool student could make a traffic light cheaper than $250,000 - $500,000 per intersection (WA state estimate). But neither one of us could build, install and maintain a quarter million of them, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to mobilize an army of nerds to make it scalable.

Yeah, for all we know a PE was involved in oversight of the project. That's an unknown that TV reporters didn't dig into and should have, because I think the story would discover a much more relaxed time.

But if one wasn't involved, I'm saying it took faith on behalf of the administration to assume responsibility for risk in backing this project, whether consciously considered or not. And there are risks with electrical projects beyond the computers, namely things catching on fire. What were the safeguards here? What if a logic error burned out a fan? What if someone hesitated to use the radios during a regular comm window out of habit and there was a medical emergency?

Faith here was well-founded because obviously nothing burned down and no one died. But who today would accept that risk without going to a licensed professional?

So much to say about this. One is the optics of employing students three decades ago, another is the remarkable faith they put into one at the time - which appears to have been well founded. Today, this sort of thing would never happen.

But overall, I get the feeling that people today are afraid of things they can't vendor out, things they can't replace cookie-cutter style. Sometimes that concern is justified, when you think in terms of support spanning decades, but overall I see it as a vertical integration of bureaucracy all around us.

It's not just this control system, it's everything. Was it Caltrans that hit a modernization roadblock because the agency hand-built railway sensors and circuits around that same time and now can't find replacement parts because people don't build things in-shop anymore?