The Soul of a New Machine

by Tracy Kidder
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The Soul of a New Machine is not about a machine. There are plenty of machines in it, but it is really about people who happen to be designing a new computer called the Eagle. The small group of people who designed the Eagle put their hearts into their work. They put their souls into it. They worked long hours for a project that hadn’t even been approved by their company, so even if they did an amazing job, the company might just throw everything away. They weren’t working for money, or even for the chance to make the world’s next popular computer. They were doing it for the pure joy of creating something.

In the 1970’s, not everybody had computers at home or on their office desks. A minicomputer could be bigger than a couch. Microsoft and Apple weren’t the biggest names in the industry back then. They were just getting started.

The Soul of a New Machine tells the story of people who work at Data General Corporation, based in Massachusetts. Data General makes minicomputers. They have a series called the Eclipse, and they have just opened a new R&D lab in North Carolina. The people who work in North Carolina are asked to design the new series that Data General will start selling, while the people still in Massachusetts are left to keep tinkering with the old Eclipses. This doesn’t make the Massachusetts people happy. They want to create something, too, so their manager, Tom West, gets them going on a new project. He didn’t really get anyone’s approval to start this new project. He’s kind of unofficially asked if the president of the company would be okay with it, and he’s kind of unofficially gotten an answer: yes, but it needs to run the same programs as the old Eclipse machines did, and it can’t have a mode bit.

What does this mean? Well, you can’t just copy a program from your iPhone to your PC and expect it to run. Back in the 1970’s, pretty much every time you got a new computer, you had to throw out all your old software and get new stuff. This new computer that Tom West’s people might be allowed to build has to run all the old programs that the old computers could run.

The “mode bit” is basically an easy way to make this happen. It’s a sort of switch. Flip it on, and the new computer works just like the old one. Flip it off and the new computer gets to run like its new, awesome, shiny, super-fast self. If Tom’s group had any chance of getting their project approved, they had to find a way to make their computers run old software without this little switch.

So off the engineers went, working hard on a project that might not even be approved. They called their new machine the Eagle, and they were darned proud of it.

The Soul of a New Machine talks about their struggles. Corporate politics was part of it, but they also had to deal with tight deadlines, try things nobody had tried before, and push themselves hard to make the best computer they could possibly make. The book is also about the people themselves: their personalities, their quirks, and their hopes and dreams. You get to meet some really amazing people this way.

The time they spent on the Eagle project isn’t all hard work. You can’t work as hard as these people doand not take breaks, so we also get to see a bit of computer geek culture. One of the games the engineers play is called Adventure, and it’s pretty famous. You can play it online if you want to see what all the fuss was about.

If you are worried about having to read computer mumbo jumbo, you can relax. Yeah, there is some. The author generally does a good job of explaining it in terms that normal people can understand, but you can skip it if you want. The book isn’t about technical details. It’s about the people.

You can read some of it online at Google Books.

If you are interested in the history of computers, you might want to check out the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

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Where to Find It

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