#WARPED REALITY CODE#

#WARPED REALITY CODE#

A few weeks later Kenyon returned with rewritten code that booted 28 seconds faster than before. Jobs went to a white board and pointed out that if 5 million people wasted an additional 10 seconds booting the computer, the sum time of all users would be equivalent to 100 human lifetimes every year. When Kenyon replied that it wasn't possible to reduce the time, Jobs asked him, 'If it would save a person’s life, could you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot time?' Kenyon said that he could. During development of the Macintosh computer in 1984, Jobs asked Larry Kenyon, an engineer, to reduce the Mac boot time by 10 seconds.

One of the best, if possibly exaggerated, examples of the reality distortion field comes from Jobs' biographer Isaacson.

On Research In Motion's official BlackBerry blog, Jim Balsillie introduced a blog post by saying 'For those of us who live outside of Apple's distortion field'. The term has been used to refer to Jobs' keynote speeches (' Stevenotes') by observers and devoted users of Apple computers and products, and derisively by Apple's competitors in criticisms of Apple. Jobs could also use the reality distortion field to appropriate others' ideas as his own, sometimes proposing an idea back to its originator, only a week after dismissing it. It was said to distort his co-workers' sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and to make them believe that whatever impossible task he had at hand was possible.

In Chapter Three of Steve Jobs, biographer Walter Isaacson states that around 1972, while Jobs was attending Reed College, Robert Friedland 'taught Steve the reality distortion field.' The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs' ability to convince himself, and others around him, to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence.

Warped reality