The soul of a new machine

by Tracy Kidder

Paperback, 1982

Status

Available

Call number

001.6404

Library's review

USA, ca 1990
Indeholder "A good man in a storm", "1: How to make a lot of money", "2: The wars", "3: Building a team", "4: Wallach's golden moment", "5: Midnight programmer", "6: Flying upside down", "7: La machine", "8: The wonderful micromachines", "9: A workshop", "10: The case of the missing

nand gate", "11: Shorter than a season", "12: Pinball", "13: Going to the fair", "14: The last crunch", "15: Canards", "16: Dinosaurs", "Epilogue", "Acknowledgments".

Historien om et team, der laver en ny computer til Data General. En Tom West skildres som lidt superman-agtig kaptajn i en storm på en sejlbåd. Og sådan er han når han holder ferie.

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Genres

Publication

New York : Avon Books, 1982.

Description

Tracy Kidder's "riveting" (Washington Post) story of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has become essential reading for understanding the history of the American tech industry. Computers have changed since 1981, when The Soul of a New Machine first examined the culture of the computer revolution. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations. The Soul of a New Machine is an essential chapter in the history of the machine that revolutionized the world in the twentieth century. "Fascinating...A surprisingly gripping account of people at work." --Wall Street Journal… (more)

Media reviews

New York Times

"The Soul of a New Machine is first of all a good story, but beyond the narrative, or rather woven into it, is the computer itself, described physically, mechanically and conceptually. The descriptive passages will not ''explain'' computers to the average reader (at least they did not significantly

increase my own very superficial knowledge), but they give a feeling, a flavor, that adds to one's understanding - as broadly, or even poetically, defined."

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— 1 more

Wired

this is from a retrospective review of the book, nearly twenty years after its publication. December, 2000 "More than a simple catalog of events or stale corporate history, Soul lays bare the life of the modern engineer - the egghead toiling and tinkering in the basement, forsaking a social life

for a technical one."

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User reviews

LibraryThing member MrJack

I was drawn to this book in 2008 because of my two decades of experience with Data General (DG) computers, both the 16-bit Nova class and the 32-bit MV class of minicomputers. My experience included system administration, script writing, programming in timeshare BASIC, setting up smart PCs as

workstations, and running a help desk. I was too busy working with DG systems in the 1980s to realize that our MV was the product of a history-making process.

In the mid 1970s, when Digital Equipment Corporation announced the VAX series, their first 32-bit minicomputers, DG responded with a crash course called the "Eagle Project." This project is the subject of Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine (1981). Kidder's book single-handedly made Data General's MV line of minicomputers the best documented computer project in history.

Kidder's book reads more like a fast-paced novel -- with somewhat less sex and violence -- than like a pedantic history book.

My Favorite Chapter: My curiosity was piqued when I came to Chapter 6, "Midnight Programmer." Being one myself, programmers were people I could identify with. But as I turned the pages, the story line gradually began to lose its appeal as I read about "Microkids" who worked on "Microteams" at their crowded desks in "Micropits" at DG. After all, my work as a programmer was done as a loner, not as a team member. To be productive, I needed quiet and solitude. Then I read this sentence that instantly drew me back into the narrative: "Much of the engineering of computers takes place in silence, while engineers pace in hallways or sit alone and gaze at blank pages." "Yes," I said to myself, "that's the way I write new software -- like an engineer at DG designs new hardware."

My Favorite Quote: I almost came unhinged when I read, "Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well." This was a favorite saying of Tom West, the chief designer in charge of the Eagle Project, the principal character in Kidder's narrative. In saying this, West meant, if you can do a quick-and-dirty job, and it works, do it. As a manager, West was pushing to get things done on time and on cost. As a programmer for whom errors are intolerable, this is a piece of managerial advice that I could never, ever internalize or respect. This saying may have worked for The Microkids at DG, but not for programmers like me.

We stayed with our DG MV at my institution for about a decade. Our operating system was AOS/VS, the most commonly used DG software product. It included CLI (Command Line Interpreter) allowing for complex scripting, DUMP/LOAD, and other custom components. Our MV ran our tailor-made software on demand with very little down time.

Although we were happy with the reliability of our Data General systems at my institution, the time came when a major change in software vendors necessitated a corresponding change in hardware. We replaced our 32-bit Data General hardware with 64-bit Alpha hardware from Digital Equipment Corporation.

Looking back on the experience two decades later, I must say in retrospect that the DG MV series was too little too late. While Data General was investing its last dollar into a dying minicomputer market, the personal computer was rapidly on the rise. For example, the 32-bit MV/8000 went out of DG's door in 1980. Barely a year later, in 1981, the 16-bit PC/XT went out of IBM's door. It was just a matter of time until PCs overtook the minicomputer market with the arrival of 32-bit, then 64-bit, then dual-core, then quad-core PCs.

This book is still a good read more than twenty-five years after it was written.

Trivia: Tom West, the protagonist in our story, was Tracy Kidder's college roommate.

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24 more

LibraryThing member bobp0303

Slightly dated, but so is yesterday. Good story, and definitely worth rereading

LibraryThing member grheault

How the rebels with crazy ideas built a computer.. An adventure story of design and develoment. Neat.

LibraryThing member scottjpearson

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board

that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market.

This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life.

Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later.

So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

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LibraryThing member karenmerguerian

Not a difficult read, and an interesting snapshot of a team of people at a technology company (Data General) in Massachusetts in the 70s as they work to develop a new minicomputer. The pace is good, and the portraits of the engineers are well-drawn. I appreciated Kidder's ability to explain the

hardware in terms a lay person can understand. The book captures well the excitement that develops among a team of workers inspired by the challenge of inventing something new--and the fallout when they are forced, near the end, to document their individual contributions in order to decide on patents. The picture of Tom West is at the center of the book, early on, he seems to have a little of a sinister side, but he eventually emerges from the project more or less unscathed and redeemed. However, I do think that today there would probably be a diagnosis for him--more's the pity, he would have been on some kind of bipolar meds and "the machine" probably would never have been developed (and who knows what toll it took on his personal life). I don't know if later editions have a "Where are they now" section, but that would be interesting to read.

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LibraryThing member jorgearanda

A technically and socially satisfying account of the development of a new computer in the late 1970's. Its glorification of the exploitative and ruthless management style of Data General is off-putting, but this might be a minor quibble on an otherwise fine book.

LibraryThing member jcbrunner

Tracy Kidder's classic portrait of (very bourgeois) geeks at work reminds us how fast technology advances. Barely a generation ago, designing a new computer necessitated writing an operating system too, leading to three linked main tasks: Creating the hardware, the operating system and the

micro-code linking the two.

The development takes places as a skunk project at Data General, one of many defunct brand names (such as Commodore) that litter the path to the emergence of modern computing. In a major misunderstanding of their success factors, the management of Data General decided to transfer their research from Massachusetts to North Carolina, mainly to create a tax shelter. The physical distance between the engineers (in NC) and the management (in MA) led to a botched technology upgrade.

Enter our heroes. Tom West assembles a team of trusted survivors and rookies to develop a backward-compatible 16-bit minicomputer. Practicing the mushroom theory of Management ("keep them in the dark, feed them shit, and watch them grow"), he shelters his team from too much CEO interference but also does not offer much direction. The actual leadership and care comes from two project managers, one responsible for the hardware, the other for the software. Despite all expectations, the team beats both their NC rivals and finish their design.

The tale does not end well. The company does not adequately reward the survivors of what will later be labeled "death-march" project, thus alienating and losing their most productive members. The shell of the company lives on for some time, while the people move on to new projects and new companies, thus completing the circle of life of technology companies.

Armed with Brooks' classic article "The Mythical man-month" and the consultant's bible at the time "In Search of Excellence", Tracy Kidder remains a fresh account of innovation and project management.

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LibraryThing member agis

Tracy Kidder's “Soul of a New Machine” is over 20 years old now, and for a book about the creation of a new microcomputer and the engineers that worked on it, that's a very long time. Not necessarily about technology – a computers are by and large still Von Nuemann machines, and the

principles are the same – but the engineer and the computer geek have become part of the culture in a way they weren't in 1980. The book, as a result, lacks some freshness to a modern reader – the bleary-eyed devotion of the engineer is an old story by now.

It's rarely told as well as it is here, though; Kidder has a knack for prose and handles everything well. The passages on computer technology slow down a little, but are still fairly impressive considering the ground he has to cover. The engineers, their quirks and motivations and doubts are depicted well, and he captures the drive and obsession with the machine and the long drag of testing as well as anything I've read. So even if the driven engineer is old hat by now, Kidder's book is still a great tome of the curious creation of a new machine.

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LibraryThing member mrgan

I really expected to love this book when it opened with an intriguing, excitingly written little anecdote. Unfortunately, what followed never reached the allegorical or dramatic heights of those first few pages.

The Soul of a New Machine is an account of the engineering of a minicomputer in the

early 80s. It follows a smallish team, and along the way, attempts to explain the pertinent technology and make grander points about the industry and computers in general. It never quite aces any of these points. The team's story is just not that interesting; the technology isn't particularly illuminated (I struggled to understand it or even care, and I'm a computer professional); and the big picture is unfortunate because this particular book was written at a largely uninteresting time in the history of computers. Just a few years later, personal computers would cause a revolution that would make Data General's products and struggles seem about as epic as buying soda at the store. It's a bit like covering the mobile phone revolution by embedding with Sony Ericsson in 2006.

Kidder is a great writer; for the most part, he keeps this dry tale readable, and does his best to make it somewhat entertaining. But he can only do so much with a yawner of a subject. The quotes he's given ramble and fizz out ("From the start it was a very important project",
"We're building what I thought we could get away with"). A typical anecdote here is the engineering team asking to have business cards printed out, and their lieutenant coming out of the boss' office with a simple "no". Not exactly the stuff of folklore.

If only Kidder had instead been embedded with Apple, Microsoft, or Xerox. As it is, I'm not sure I'd recommend this book since the few bits of insight and the-more-things-change moments aren't worth the dull rest of it.

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LibraryThing member richjj

How does this book manage its narrative from such subject matter? Technical computer processor design and the office lives of people working on a corporate project. Dense technical details are sometimes impenetrable and sometimes, somehow interesting. But I guess there have been other literary

classics famously too immersed in the details of their setting.

What I see in this story are the people who were driven to create something noteworthy against the odds. The ambition to accomplish something in their lives. I would think that we are not accustomed to glorifying the daily grind, and we imagine true ambition must be in a romantic cause. But in this telling, I feel glory from the engineers in the cubicles and the labs who dig deeply and are motivated by their work, facing uncertainty and challenges.

Yes, this is about a now-defunct company and obsolete technology, but it's surprising how much about business and engineering and technology is so familiar, even though these are famously fast-changing fields.

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LibraryThing member Count_Zero

About 6 years ago, a sort of scandal rocked the gaming industry related to a blog post by a woman known as "EASpouse". The blog post criticized EA's labor practices at the time, which required employees to work massive amounts of unpaid overtime, as they were salaried employees. By massive, I mean

about 12-16 hour days, 6 days a week, regularly. This was a big deal among gamers, because very few of us had ever had the opportunity to peek behind the curtain like this. It was likely that most of us viewed game development with a variation of the way that Roald Dahl as a child imagined the inside of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory near the boarding school he attended (which later led to Charlie & the Chocolate Factory).

The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder shows that such working conditions are nothing new. The book follows the development process of Data General's micro-computer (sort of like a rack mounted server, except it's the size of the whole unit, but essentially only being one of the server nodes), that would be a successor to their Eclipse line of microcomputers, code named the Eagle, and later released as the MV/8000. The book goes into both the personal and technical aspects of the development process, profiling the various men (and a few women) involved in the project, and giving a description of the technical aspects of the process for the layman.

While the technical bits (pardon the pun), are enjoyable, the book's strength, and where it spends most of its time, is in profiles of the people. The book paints a bleak picture of the inner workings of Data General. The working conditions at Data General, particularly on this project, are brutal. Much as with EA Spouse, employees are salaried, with no overtime pay, and work 12-16 hour days, 6 days a week. As the project goes on, project leads and younger employees are worn down. Often, employees at Data General observe that the company brings in a lot of new fresh recruits, and few stay at the company after they turn 30. Many of these new recruits drop out for various reasons, and often employees discuss the company's sweat-shop like working conditions. As the project moves into the heat of summer, the air conditioning breaks, turning their windowless basement office into a sweltering oven, which they can't even leave the door open for, for security reasons. Only after the employees strike do they fix the air conditioning.

By the end of the book, several of the project leads, themselves burned out, leave the company, and while some of the employees on the Eagle team stay on, many more have left.

Tracy Kidder got an impressive amount of access at Data General when he wrote this book, and while he's honest and truthful about what happened there, Data General, at least to my 21st century mind, comes out of this book smelling like shit. I base this solely on what Data General does, and I know this because Kidder doesn't whitewash - he thankfully calls it right down the middle.

While the book is never accusatory, it makes clear that Data General is a predatory employer. It preys on young, semi-idealistic college Engineering graduates, who don't have a lot of job experience and are looking more for interesting problems to solve, interesting work to do, than a big paycheck. They promise them interesting problems, and briefly, very briefly, warn them that there will be long hours and possibly a limited social life, that this job will become their life. To meet the deadlines required of them they will have to give up friends, family, and the outside world, living only the job, for months or years at a time. Plus, because they're salaried, despite all the hours they get that would be overtime, they're only making their standard pay grade.

It chews up 22-24 year old kids, and spits them out at 30, burnouts who had great potential, but were consumed by their jobs. They don't say if many of these former employees stay in the industry, and some certainly do - Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes and current Chief Software Architect at Microsoft is a Data General veteran. However, those who leave the industry with a sour taste in their mouth will probably leave worse off then they would be if they worked somewhere else. Had they been actually paid overtime, they could have possibly built a nest egg that could have allowed them to retire early, or to at least take their time looking for work elsewhere.

While some poor decisions related to processor architecture helped to kill Data General right before the dawn of the 21st century, it is my suspicion that the boom in Silicon Valley may have inspired a brain drain. Nicer weather, a less oppressive corporate culture. For people who wanted more money, there was the change to come in on the ground floor of companies which had the potential to be worth millions and get significant stock options. For those who preferred challenge, they could face whole new challenges when designing new systems and new architectures at the new companies in the Valley.

In summary, the book is a high resolution snapshot of the early days of the computer industry, before the internet started to permeate our lives in subtle ways - computerized tax processing, credit cards, ATM machines, and so on, leading up to the more overt ways it would later find its way in - Bulletin Board Services, E-Mail, and finally, proper web pages. People interested in the history of the computer industry will certainly find this fascinating. People who don't care about the history of computing can still find something in the profiles of the people in this project, and how the project's process slowly wears them all down.

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LibraryThing member TheAmpersand

I'm sure there are some people out there who find his writing too soft-hearted or lacking in technical detail, but for my money, Tracy Kidder just might be the best investigative journalist out there. In "The Soul of a New Machine" he traces the development of a computer -- code-named "Eagle" --

developed by the Data General company of Westborough, Massachusetts. As other reviewers have mentioned, Kidder's subject is not the machine itself but the people behind it -- driven, gifted computer designers working in what was then a fairly new and rapidly growing field. Kidder's ability to describe his subjects is unparallelled -- his sketches of the engineers he observed are both memorable and perceptive, and he's got a wonderful facility for divining what motivates each member of Data General's team. His writing's most remarkable quality, however, is the feeling of intimacy it transmits to his readers. The tech-heads Kidder covered poured every ounce of their energy into the Eagle, and "The Soul of a New Machine" does more than effectively record their hopes, ambitions, frustrations, and fears -- it also makes them seem comprehensible and emotionally accessible. One gets the feeling that the author didn't just report on his subjects' project, he suffered through it with them. This immediacy makes a real difference: it allows Kidder to take what might have been a dry, technical subject and wrings real drama from it. "The Soul of a New Machine" is so emotionally involving it reads something like a cliff-hanger. During the book's last few chapters, I earnestly hoped that those engineers would get their computer out the door and see it find a place in the wider world.

Some other reviewers have also described the book as a bit "dated," and well, yes, it is. After all, many of Kidder's subjects used pencil and paper to work out their computing designs. Still, it's an interesting and valuable historical document from an era when computers were a niche market restricted mostly to specialists rather than an everyday presence in the lives of billions of people. Kidder's patient and deliberate, taking readers of the late seventies, who were probably much less tech-savvy than today's average book-buyer, through the very basics of what was then modern computing. This is the real foundation of the computer age -- ones and zeros, basic chip design, and machine code -- and even in a world where applications seem to get much more attention than hardware, it was useful to read up on this stuff. Of course, now that we can fit the computing power of dozens of Eagles in our front pockets, it's hard not to think of Data General's engineers as cybertronic cavemen, but reading the relatively primitive methods they used to design a state-of-the-art computer in just a few short months makes their achievement seem all the more impressive. Recommended to computer enthusiasts and non-ethusiasts alike.

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LibraryThing member PatienceFortitude

I was expecting and hoping to like this book, but I feel like it was fighting with itself between telling the story of the technology and telling a story about the people involved as characters. it's so crowded to keep track of. will be discussing it in class tomorrow. So we shall see.

LibraryThing member PatienceFortitude

LibraryThing member JeremyPreacher

I came at this book from an unusual perspective - I had more of an interest in Tom West as a person than the now-historical business side of things. It more or less did what I wanted it to do from that angle, although it's not actually a biography, but the book really shines in its capsule

descriptions of all the members of the team.

I've worked in high-pressure tech industry jobs, and I'm sort of depressed to see that things were the same then as they are now - unrealistic deadlines, bullshit from the bottom to the top, burnout, "widow's" clubs among the families, etc. But the book presents them in a charitable yet accurate light, and as such I very much appreciated it.

It's fairly technical in many places. Kidder makes a gallant effort to find metaphors and explanations for the lay reader - as I am not actually a lay reader, I can't swear that they work, but I suspect they sort of don't. It would be totally possible, however, to skim those bits and still get the important parts of the story.

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LibraryThing member wb_tech

Talk about local flare - this book highlights the start of the computer industry from the perspective of Data General, right here in Westborough near 495. I'm also biased towards this book because my Dad worked for DG for over 15 years before moving to Mack Technologies. I was so excited to be

assigned this book as a required reading for a college course entitled "History of Technology in Society"

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LibraryThing member richardhobbs

One of my favorites- I worked on this machine when it came out

LibraryThing member ingridtech

assigned this book as a required reading for a college course entitled "History of Technology in Society"

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LibraryThing member Farringdon

I read it a long time ago. It was brilliant because it was more about people than computers.

LibraryThing member Borg-mx5

A wonderful book about the now lost minicomputer industry and the people who make computers. Almost an ethnographic study, Kidder spends a great deal of time with people, observing and reporting. I actually found this book to be exciting and from it comes one of my favorite quotes: "Some things

worth doing are worth not doing well."

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LibraryThing member DWWilkin

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek.

In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999

when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world.

Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order.

Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project.

Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

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LibraryThing member PatienceFortitude

LibraryThing member mykl-s

Good descriptions of complex decisions about hardware and software and organization.

LibraryThing member pbirch01

The recent tv show "Halt and Catch Fire" made me pick this book up. This is quite different than Kidder's other books but in also very similar because it tells the story of a large group of people working together towards a common goal. The book was published in 1981 but it was amazing how many of

the themes remain the same: computers in our everyday lives, the quantization of everything, working with a group on large projects. The technology aspect is also interesting but the real joy is how Kidder describes and elucidates the group dynamics of the company.

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LibraryThing member ajlewis2

I lost interest at around 20% into the book.

Fewer