October 5: Steve Jobs and lifetime

On October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, died at 56, in Palo Alto, California, after years of treatment for pancreatic cancer.

What happened

Jobs's death was announced by Apple one day after the launch of a new iPhone. Within hours, the company's stores around the world became places of tribute, with flowers, notes and bitten apples left at the door.

Six years earlier, on June 12, 2005, in the Stanford University commencement address, Jobs had spoken of his own death. He said he had received a cancer diagnosis and that remembering he would die was the most important tool he had ever found to help him make the big choices in life. He said death is very likely the single best invention of life, because it clears the way for the new. And he closed with a farewell he had read in the final issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, which became famous in his voice: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

Why it matters

The date is remembered every year by those who work in technology and innovation. But there's a Jobs story that speaks more directly about time than any speech.

In 1983, he asked engineer Larry Kenyon to shave ten seconds off the time the Macintosh took to boot. To justify the request, he did a calculation: ten seconds, times millions of users, every day, added up to the equivalent of several human lifetimes a year. Shaving ten seconds would be, in his words, saving lives. The account is by Andy Hertzfeld, who was on the team, and is published on folklore.org.

A correction: Jobs didn't ask for the Mac to "boot in ten seconds", and no one said it was impossible. He asked for the boot time to drop by ten seconds, and the team managed it over the following months.

The bridge to Bairo's vision

The ten-seconds calculation is the one closest to the way Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez thinks about time. For him, lifetime is the measure of everything. The yardstick he proposed for BICOIN (BTZ), the governance currency of the BTZ Chain network, is "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life". It's a yardstick of purpose, not a price. Nothing here is an offer, a recommendation or a promise of value, and the network is under development, subject to applicable regulation.

The idea has old relatives: since 1980, the time banks created by Edgar Cahn have traded an hour of service for an hour. Bairo proposes a new chapter of that idea, and that's how it's told, with humility and with its relatives credited, in the chapter A whole body.

The Jobs episode opens Bairo's story in Fifty-five years later. Jobs's own path, pushed out of the company he founded, is in Steve Jobs: pushed out of the company he founded.

Sources

• Stanford Report, speech of 06/12/2005: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2005/06/steve-jobs-2005-graduates-stay-hungry-stay-foolish
• Andy Hertzfeld, "Saving Lives" (1983): https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
• Steve Jobs (biography and death on 10/05/2011): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
• Time banks and Edgar Cahn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency