It was my first date with the woman who is now my wife. We went to it for several years when we were involved with the organization that sponsors it. This year we're staying home by the fireplace watching some TV and just generally goofing off. Not a bad way to see the new year in.

Yes, pre-microprocessor, relay logic elevator controllers. I see lots of them that were put in 40+ years ago still working and doing their job after all these years.

Those that do, are usually set at around 75% of rated capacity. When load weighting is activated, the car should ignore hall calls, but, obviously, cannot ignore car calls.

I did all my elevator in assembly language, Sonny. (Seriously) Now get off my grass.

We don't use the term "crash" when talking about elevators.

We rate elevator speeds in feet per minute. A typical small hydraulic elevator will run 100 FPM. A high-rise express car may get up to 1,500 FPM.

single floor runs and for multi-floor runs. Yes, the faster the car is running, the longer the slowdown distance since smooth acceleration and deceleration are desirable.

You will most commonly find it in large urban areas like NY and Chicago. In the Midwest where I worked in the elevator business, it's rarely a requested feature because folks aren't in such a rush in general.

I designed the hardware and wrote the code for a much smaller elevator company for 25 years... All written in assembly language running on an 8085 CPU with 256 bytes (Yes, bytes) if RAM and 8K bytes of EPROM. It doesn't take much to handle the basics when you're using assembly language. I've done up to 26 stops in a multi-car group with that setup. Each elevator is independent and can run on its own, but they communicate with each other to handle dispatching so multiple cars coordinate their activity.

Optimizing is worthwhile, but adds a lot of complexity. You have to take into account for car locations, direction, speed, where car and hall calls are locatedand have to figure in such things as door times to calculate which car can service a hall call soonest.

As the author says, it's a set of interesting problems and I've had fun with it. Yes, the equipment I designed and wrote the software for is obsolete now, but there's a lot of it out there so I'm anticipating writing updates for a while longer as I head toward eventual retirement.

I've got a Collins 75A-2 receiver that was made in 1952. It still works fine.

I work for a company with 30,000 employees world wide. I got a nice new HP i5 laptop about a year ago. It came with XP Pro and Office 2003. I'm seeing no move to "upgrade", but I'll admit that I'm not in IT so I am not privy to plans before they are announced to the world. Friends are asking me if they should be upgrading to a Win 7 machine while they still can. I tell them, Yes. I'll take a look at 8 in a couple of years when the dust has settled.

I work in the elevator business as an Engineer. One day I was working on software in a new installation when the service man with me got a call to service an elevator in a mansion nearby. He suggested I come with him as it was an interesting installation. It was indeed. This was a three stop elevator installed in 1917 and all original and working just like it did almost 100 years ago. The controller resembled a cast iron bathtub with a lid having the relays mounted suspended from it. When the lid was lowered the relays were suspended in oil. I've seen some very old elevators still in use, but never one like that.

I have their "Batupo" model that I use for EPROMS in my work and have found it very easy to use and it works well. The only gripe I've got is that their software is Windows only and uses .NET, but other than that they're solid. See http://www.batronix.com/shop/programmer/eprom-programmer.html