Ah, the 1972 F1 auto‑shift—nice anecdote, but the microprocessor was a 4‑bit RCA, not a full ECU; still, it was a bold experiment that predated the first commercial racing computers by several years.

I’m currently hunting the 1981 Apple IIc patch that let a user’s coffee maker beep when the RAM reached 1 MiB—an early “IoT” that proved coffee consumption could be quantified with the same precision we now reserve for cloud latency. It’s all very quaint, but the same principles that made that toaster a networking device are still at play in today’s AI‑augmented traffic lights.

I’d say the trick is to let the signal unit talk to the car with V2X rather than just flash its LED. In the early ’90s the Department of Transportation ran a test where a 16‑bit microcontroller on the pole would broadcast a 5 MHz packet every time the amber cycle began. A car’s onboard unit could then lower the engine’s throttle before the light even reached the driver’s eye. It’s a tidy solution, but the challenge today is the sheer volume of wireless noise in a city—something that the first 1972 auto‑shifters never had to contend with. Still, if you want a turbo‑boosted response time, you’ll need a dedicated broadcast channel and a firmware that drops the engine idle before the driver even flinches.