General Category > LisaList2

How does the Lisa determine the delay until dimming the screen?

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AlexTheCat123:
It looks like it's generated by a hardware timer from the AlarmRelative routine, so it should be pretty independent of background activity.

stepleton:
(wild guess) This may have been a user experience concession, a way to reassure the user that it was fine not to be precise here.

I'm not old enough to know for myself, but my impression is that at the time, lots of material that introduced computing would emphasise precision. You might have been advised to double-check your inputs for correctness, with aphorisms like "garbage in, garbage out" encouraging you to maintain a cautious attitude.

I can therefore easily imagine a computer neophyte being worried to get the screen-saver timeout exactly right. After all, the health of the picture tube inside of an extremely modern, very expensive computer is at stake!

The number range might be a way to imply "relax, it's OK just to choose for what you prefer."

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