Those who are already a few years old, such as the undersigned, will remember those distant times when it took a long time to turn on the computer. From the moment you pressed the button to the moment you were able to interact with it, it easily took a minute or two. Technology has made phenomenal progress in both hardware and software, and it’s rare that we have to boot the computer today, but in the early 80’s the situation was very different, and Steve Jobs himself was clear on one thing: The Macintosh needed to boot faster.

Steve Jobs was open. Andy Hertzfeld worked on the original team that created the Apple Macintosh and would go on to actually come up with the iconic and unknown General Magic. This engineer wrote a text in August 1983 telling the story “Steve wants us to boot the Macintosh faster”.

damn floppy disk. In this story, Hertzfeld described the Macintosh’s Motorola 68000 processor being 10 times faster than the Apple II’s MOS 6502, but noted: “Our Achilles heel was the floppy drive. Our RAM was limited so we had to load data from the floppy”, but Apple There was nothing faster than II. Once we started running real applications, it was clear that the floppy disk would be a major bottleneck.”

kick-off. The engineer explained that one of the things that bothered Steve Jobs was how long it took for the Mac to start up. “Checking memory, booting the operating system, and loading the Finder may take a few minutes or even longer.”

“You have to make it go faster!”. That’s when Jobs went to Larry Kenyon’s office, the engineer responsible for working with the disk controller and file system. “The Macintosh starts very slowly. You have to make it run faster!” she said to him.

think big. Although Kenyon gave him some ideas to work on, Jobs was not interested and went on with his work, thinking aloud how important it was to solve the problem. “How many people will use the Macintosh?” she wondered. “I bet that in a few years, five million people will boot up their Macintoshes at least once a day.”

Quick start saves lives. That’s when Jobs gave that engineer a unique prediction. “Let’s say you can save 10 seconds of boot time. Multiply that by five million users, that’s 50 million seconds per day. Over the year that’s probably dozens of lives. So if you can boot 10 seconds faster, it saved a dozen lives. It’s worth it, isn’t it? ?”

a good talk. This message from Jobs was unique, but it didn’t help much because, according to Hertzfel, “we were already quite motivated to make the software as fast as possible.” Finally, he explained, they managed to shorten the start time by more than ten seconds in the next two months. The rest, as they say, is history.

blessed suspension. Today, almost no one cares about this problem, because suspension mods that “sleep” or get equipment ready in a matter of seconds give us life. There are still many users who turn the computer off and on frequently, but nowadays these processes take much less time, often less than 10 seconds.

Image | view | Mark Mathosian

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