What Is Ohnosecond?

If you've ever sat in front of a computer with your mouth hanging open, anxiously waiting for something to load, and then heard the sickening sound of the spinning wheel and realized that you forgot to plug in your laptop—then you know what it's like to have an ohnosecond. Ohnosecond is those moments when our lives change forever because we've done something stupid with technology. They're like a sudden epiphany: an instant realization that things aren't as they seem and that our lives are about to turn in a new direction. Elizabeth Powell Crowe probably coined the term in her 1993 book "The Electronic Traveler." It's believed she used the word mashing together "oh no" and "second" to refer to that split second when a user realizes their mistake. Things are going on behind the scenes that we don't even notice. For example, did you know that every time you press a key on your keyboard, that action takes an ohnosecond? An ohnosecond is a unit of time used in computing. It's short enough to be measured in billionths of a second. It is based on Planck's constant, one of physics's most fundamental physical constants. In this case, the ohnosecond measures the time it takes for your computer to process what you've typed into its system and then send it out through its outputs (like your monitor). This can vary depending on what kind of hardware you have installed in your computer or phone—for example, if you're using a touchscreen or not—and how fast your processor runs its instructions. This means that if you're using an older version of Windows like Windows 95 or Windows 98 (which were popular back when they first came out), then each keystroke would take longer than it would today with something like