Not foresight. It was a limitation of the hardware at the time. It's also a relic of the past and no longer accurate as modern boards don't possess the same limitation.

>Not foresight. It was a limitation of the hardware at the time.

Nonsense. Even mechanically timed lights can be wired to illuminate any arbitrary set of lamp in either direction. The only difference between then and now is that back then you had to physically move wires, whereas now it's software switched.

Well, yeah. I phrased that poorly. I'm just saying there is very little chance the designers foresaw the possibilities of people hacking into the lights when they were transitioned into computer controlled. I imagine it was done because it reduced the chance of a bug in the hardware creating an ambiguous signal.