>>http://demoseen.com/bhpaper.html
>
>Interesting read

Sure is. I frequently think of these seemingly simple systems, how would I implement them, what are the requirements, why was this or that feature introduced in the first place, and botched in the second, and generally think of Alan Cooper frequently. Nowadays you get these small computers in pretty much anything: my bicycle torchlight has one. I have to press the only button for four seconds to turn it off; a single press will just switch it between shining and flashing.

Or just think of a simple barcode reader - it has to recheck everything it scans against its internal table of programming values, just to see if it needs to react to one of these special cases, and then to check it again against the currently selected encoding in order to know how to interpret the values and send out a string of bytes. Or your drive-by-wire gas pedal.