The coal-fired steam plant where I worked for just over six years was an interesting place; it had started as a two-unit plant, but was expanded to four units, then six, then eight...with the predictable result that the newer units used a later generation of control technology.
Semi-anecdote:
Units 1&2 had front-fired Babcox-Wilcox boilers with pneumatic Bailey controls; reportedly, these worked well, but could have considerable time lag. An operator in the 1&2 control room I was chatting with said that once he had spun a control knob several revolutions as part of making a load change, then realized he had spun the wrong one. He was sure the unit must be heading for a trip because of his mistake, but discovered with some amusement that the controlled device had barely begun changing its output, so he rapidly spun the knob back to where it had been and carried on. This behaviour was in stark contrast to 3&4, which had tangentially fired Combustion Engineering boilers with solid state controls; the operators said the control response was so rapid they'd almost swear sometimes changes would happen before they'd been dialed in...
CR
"As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." [Proverbs 27:17, NIV]