Saving lives
We always thought the Mac was a fast computer because of its 68,000th microprocessor , which was 10 times faster than the Apple II . But our Achilles heel was a floppy disk drive. We had a limited amount of RAM, so it was often necessary to load data from a floppy disk, and in speed we did it as slowly as on the Apple II. When we launched the first real applications on the Macintosh, we realized that the floppy drive is our weak link.
One of the things that bothered Steve Jobs most was the time it took to launch the Mac. Sometimes a Mac could run for a few minutes or more. At boot time, it was necessary to test the memory, initialize the operating system, and load the Finder . One morning, Steve came up with an original idea of ​​how to motivate us to make Mac faster.
Larry Kenyon was an engineer who worked on the disk driver and file system. Steve came to his cubic and began to convince him: “The Mac is loading too long. You have to make it faster! ”
Larry began to talk about the parts of the system where, in his opinion, he could improve some details, but Steve was not interested. He continued: “You know, I thought about it. How many people will use a Mac? Million? No, even more. In a couple of years, I assure you, five million people will turn on their Macs at least once a day. ”
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“Suppose you can squint 10 seconds of boot time. Multiply it by 5 million users and you will get 50 million seconds every day. For a year it is possible many human lives. So if you download it 10 seconds faster, then you think you have saved many lives. It's worth it, don't you think so? ”
Even before this conversation, we were motivated enough to make our programs as fast as it was possible for us, so I’m not sure that it was this speech that had such a big effect, although it was funny enough. In any case, in a few months, we managed to speed up the Macintosh boot process by more than 10 seconds.
One of the things that bothered Steve Jobs most was the time it took to launch the Mac. Sometimes a Mac could run for a few minutes or more. At boot time, it was necessary to test the memory, initialize the operating system, and load the Finder . One morning, Steve came up with an original idea of ​​how to motivate us to make Mac faster.
Larry Kenyon was an engineer who worked on the disk driver and file system. Steve came to his cubic and began to convince him: “The Mac is loading too long. You have to make it faster! ”
Larry began to talk about the parts of the system where, in his opinion, he could improve some details, but Steve was not interested. He continued: “You know, I thought about it. How many people will use a Mac? Million? No, even more. In a couple of years, I assure you, five million people will turn on their Macs at least once a day. ”
')
“Suppose you can squint 10 seconds of boot time. Multiply it by 5 million users and you will get 50 million seconds every day. For a year it is possible many human lives. So if you download it 10 seconds faster, then you think you have saved many lives. It's worth it, don't you think so? ”
Even before this conversation, we were motivated enough to make our programs as fast as it was possible for us, so I’m not sure that it was this speech that had such a big effect, although it was funny enough. In any case, in a few months, we managed to speed up the Macintosh boot process by more than 10 seconds.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/30940/
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