What did Steve Jobs ask about the Macintosh boot time?

In 1983, Steve Jobs asked engineer Larry Kenyon to reduce the Macintosh's boot time. The argument became famous: ten seconds less, multiplied by millions of users every day, would add up to the equivalent of several human lifetimes a year. The account comes from Andy Hertzfeld, and the story inspires Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez.

What the record says

Hertzfeld told the story in the piece "Saving Lives," dated August 1983, published on the folklore.org website and later in the book Revolution in the Valley (2004). According to him, Jobs said the Mac booted too slowly. He did the math for five million users and concluded that ten seconds saved could "save a dozen lives" a year.

Over the following months, the team cut more than ten seconds from the boot time. Hertzfeld himself says he doesn't know how much the argument weighed: the team was already working on it.

One correction matters here. The request was not "make the Mac boot in ten seconds," and there is no record of anyone saying it was impossible. The power of the anecdote lies elsewhere.

The bridge to the yardstick of time

What the story shows is the habit of giving human meaning to a number. Seconds become lives. It is an idea close to the one Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez proposes with BTZ Chain, where the yardstick "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life" measures purpose, not price. In both, people's time is treated as the most valuable resource there is.

Read also

• Fifty-five years later
• A whole body
• Saving Lives, by Andy Hertzfeld