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 Saving Lives                                     Password:
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     Author: Andy Hertzfeld                       [Log in]
       Date: August 1983                          Create new account
 Characters: Steve Jobs, Larry Kenyon             Related Stories
     Topics: Software Design, Inspiration         * Reality
    Summary: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh Distortion Field
             boot faster                          Rating
                                                  Overall
 We always thought of the Macintosh as a fast     Rating: 3.90
 computer, since its 68000 microprocessor was     [stars] (good)
 effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II,    Login to add your
 but our Achilles heel was the floppy disk. We    own ratings
 had limited RAM, so it was often necessary to    
 load data from the floppy, but there we were no  Your rating:
 faster than an Apple II. Once we had real        ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
 applications going, it was clear the floppy disk   1   2   3   4   5
 was going to be a significant bottleneck.



 One of the things that bothered Steve Jobs the
 most was the time that it took to boot when the
 Mac was first powered on. It could take a couple
 of minutes, or even more, to test memory,
 initialize the operating system, and load the
 Finder. One afternoon, Steve came up with an
 original way to motivate us to make it faster.

 Larry Kenyon was the engineer working on the
 disk driver and file system. Steve came into his
 cubicle and started to exhort him. "The
 Macintosh boots too slowly. You've got to make
 it faster!"

 Larry started to explain about some of the
 places where he thought that he could improve
 things, but Steve wasn't interested. He
 continued, "You know, I've been thinking about
 it. How many people are going to be using the
 Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a
 few years, I bet five million people will be
 booting up their Macintoshes at least once a
 day."

 "Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of
 the boot time. Multiply that by five million
 users and thats 50 million seconds, every single
 day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of
 lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds
 faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's
 really worth it, don't you think?"

 We were pretty motivated to make the software go
 as fast as we could anyway, so I'm not sure if
 this pitch had much effect, but we thought it
 was pretty humorous, and we did manage to shave
 more than ten seconds off the boot time over the
 next couple of months.


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[triangle]5 Comments      Show Comments Add New Comment
from Andy Hertzfeld on July 21, 2003 09:44:11
This story was used in Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds.
from henry on January 29, 2004 23:57:40
One thing Mac folks comment on when I demo my old "128K" Mac is how
fast it boots. There's a pause before the beep because there's 2 megs
of RAM to test, but then smiley Mac, a swish from the Micah hard disk
and the Finder is open in 2 seconds. The old Finder is small and the
system is largely in ROM. As functions accreted over time, booting
got slower and s-l-o-w-e-r till it takes 3 to 5 minutes for OS 9 to
boot. I notice each rev of OS X boots faster than the one before. I
detect Steve's influence.
from Stephen Taylor on March 29, 2005 04:46:33
I noticed too how quickly my Mac Plus' boot... super fast. It's
amazing how much is in ROM! OS 9 was a beast in the end and I just
couldn't stand how slow it booted. Henry is right about X - it goes
quicker with every single revision (even on older Macs) and on my new
'book it's great. Keep it up guys! I still long for the simpler days
sometimes, though!
from John H on September 22, 2005 15:35:30
A nice 'clean' install on my old Mac LCIII was fast to boot (so long
as you weren't doing appletalk networking on a busy network, where
the process of finding a free address was tediously slow). The
problem for me was all the extra Extensions and Control Panels that I
had installed that turned the boot process into a tea-making event!
from Cecil Meeks on July 28, 2017 19:17:42
My Commodore 64 boots faster than my Mac SE. Take that Apple! LOL

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