[MontyCarloHall]

> the Chief Engineer was the only person authorized to make changes to the master plan.

> the plans were printed out weekly for review at the status update meeting.

This is so quintessentially Japanese. Have a single point of failure in a rigid chain of command structure, but bake in a ton of paper redundancy. Nonetheless, I bet the lost laptop was an extremely advanced model.

In the early 2000s, my dad worked with some Japanese collaborators. They brought over some impossibly thin laptops that seemed a decade ahead of what you could get in the US at the time…and proceeded to use them to send faxes.