9 minutes with the clock gods
Ever wondered why, when you hit the snooze button, you only get 9 minutes on your alarm in the morning? Cecil has the answer, as always:
So what may have happened was, some early chip designer inspected an old mechanical clock with a snooze button, figured that a nine-minute snooze interval had been ordained by the clock gods, and built it into his chip—and we’ve been stuck with it ever since. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.
And, as it always seems. It’s just random.
This entry was posted at 3:03 pm on 24 May 2006 and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
Perhaps it is a conspiracy to confuse? I just found it odd that it wasn’t just straight up 10 minutes. That seems “logical.”
I’ve always thought it’s because 9 minutes is the longest snooze that’s possible with a single-digit compare: take the current time in minutes, subtract one from the least-significant digit, and set off the alarm when the least-significant digit in the current time in minutes equals the saved snooze digit.
Cecil addresses this, and, unsurprisingly, gets it wrong: “On a digital clock, nine is the greatest interval obtainable by advancing some sort of “snooze counter” on the ones column. But why mess with the ones column? Why not put the snooze counter on the tens column and advance that by one?”
The reason this doesn’t work is because if you had your alarm set for 6:45 and pushed snooze, then incremented the tens digit and compared, the alarm would go off in 5 minutes, not 10, when the time reached 6:50. To get it to do 10 full minutes, you need to store and compare the last two digits of the time, which was a non-trivial extra cost when LED clocks were first invented.
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So why does my phone snooze for 11 minutes then? :-)