That's an interesting though, like software documentation that hasn't been updated over years of patches.
Do you remember where you read that? Sounds like an interesting bit of history.
Do you remember where you read that? Sounds like an interesting bit of history.
The analogy to out-of-date software documentation is very apt. As problems or inefficiencies popped up in the factory, they'd change things and just not write them down (because of deadline pressure, often). If you wanted to build new ones you'd have to either get the factory workers to show you how the thing was actually built, or tear down a working example to reverse engineer it. (Which has been done!)