snooze

[TyroneBigums]

why do snoox

[joko]

whut????

[TyroneBigums]

that was supposed to say, "why do snooze buttons only last nine minutes?" i have found the answer:

By setting the snooze time to 9 minutes, modern digital alarm clocks only needs to watch the last digit of the time. So, if you hit snooze at 6:45, the alarm goes off again when the last digit hits 4 - at 6:54. They couldn't make the snooze period 10 minutes, or the alarm would go off right away - or the clock would take more circuitry.

Historically speaking, there's another element to the answer. Clock experts say when snooze alarms were invented, the gears in alarm clocks were standardized. The snooze gear was introduced into the existing mix and its teeth had to mesh with the other gears' teeth. The engineers had to choose between a gear that made the snooze period nine-plus minutes or 10-plus minutes. Because of the gear configuration, 10 minutes on the nose was not an option.

[fo3nix]

I'm not sure that's the correct answer (it's very easy to get both units of the digital clock moving).

I read a few weeks ago that it's because in the original mechanical alarm clocks, they were designed to ring at 10 minutes after (it's a nice round number), but not any later than that at all. So the engineers made sure that it wouldn't go off too late by putting the alarm somewhere between 9 and 10 minutes (it's mechanical, so it's not an exact science). Then when the engineers came to making the original chip for the digital clock (upon which most others now are based), they checkout out how the mechanical clocks time things, and thought that they were set to 9 minutes for some specific reason, so kept it at 9 minutes.

This seems more plausable to me.