Historical Reflections the Immortal Soul of an Old Machine Taking Apart a Book to Figure out How It Works
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viewpoints VDOI:10.1145/3436249 Thomas Haigh Historical Reflections The Immortal Soul of an Old Machine Taking apart a book to figure out how it works. HE BEST BOOK ever written about IT work or the com- puter industry will be 40 years old in August. Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New TMachine describes the work of Data General engineers to prototype a minicomputer, codenamed “Eagle,” intended to halt the advance of the Digital Equipment Corporation’s hugely successful VAX range. It won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for non-fiction, perhaps the two highest honors available for book-length journalism. Year after year, the book continues to sell and win new fans. Developers born since it was published often credit it with shaping their career choices or help- ing them appreciate the universal as- pects of their own experiences. Soul’s appeal has endured, even though what started out as a dispatch from a fast-growing firm building a piece of the future now reads as a time capsule from a lost world. Back in 1991 1: It Does Not Assume In contrast, Soul delivers a self-con- I read the book for an undergraduate You Know Anything tained package, containing everything class, typing my paper on a PC that was Paradoxically, the obscurity of Data Gen- you need to enjoy the story. Back in 1981 already more capable than Eagle yet eral helps to explain the book’s endur- most potential readers had never used a cost 100 times less. So why are so many ing power. My shelves are full of books computer of any kind, still less a “super people still excited to relive the cre- about Microsoft, Apple, Netscape, and minicomputer.” Kidder would have had ation of a pitifully obsolete computer, Oracle written while the companies to self-publish any book written for designed by a team of obscure engi- were famous. Their authors assumed Data General fans, and anyway he knew neers for a long-forgotten company anyone who picked the book up was nothing about computers when he ar- that never mattered very much anyway? already fascinated with the company, rived in Westborough, MA, to follow up Having spent almost 30 years now try- cared deeply about its products, and a suggestion from his editor. Kidder’s ing to take the book apart and figure would enjoy endless pages of gossip, only previous book was about a murder out how it works, I think I have some corporate strategy, legal maneuverings, and his main life experience, other answers. Ten of them, in fact. and trivia. They have not aged well. than a Harvard degree in English and ASSOCIATES ANDRIJ BORYS BY IMAGE 32 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM | JANUARY 2021 | VOL. 64 | NO. 1 viewpoints an MFA from Iowa, was having spent 80960, and Itanium) and even DEC’s two unhappy but uneventful years as much-admired Alpha processor. First Lieutenant, Military Intelligence Many readers The clean sheet approach failed for in Vietnam. were tantalized by Data General too. Anticipating this, Tom West rounded up the best of the 2: It Reads Like a Classic the idea of computer engineers left behind in Massachu- American Novel architecture as setts to launch a semi-clandestine ef- The book was a milestone in the devel- a creative medium fort to produce a 32-bit extension of V opment of what is now called “literary the existing 16-bit Eclipse minicom- nonfiction.” To keep us turning pages, in which experts puter, preserving compatibility by in- Kidder draws deeply on the mythic ar- terleaving old and new instructions chetypes of American literature, as in his could read traces seamlessly rather than using a “mode introduction of Tom West, his protago- of individual bit” to enter a separate legacy mode. nist and the project’s leader, during a (More than 20 years later, AMD played prologue that recalls Ernest Hemming- flare or, as here, a comparable trick on Intel by extend- way: West awes the other crew members a conservative ing the standard x86 architecture to of a small sailing boat with his stamina 64-bits). For the project to be approved and ruggedly taciturn optimism when organizational as “insurance” against problems with hit by a storm. “Whatever he did for a culture. the North Carolina team, West had to living,” they conclude, “it was probably promise the impossible task of pro- interesting and obviously important.” ducing the entire computer in one year. Having hooked us on the enigmatic Thirty engineers crowded together, Tom West, Kidder is cocky enough to turning the basement of Data General’s spend an entire chapter without men- headquarters into a site of relentlessly tioning him, instead introducing Data Smithsonian Observatory. That doesn’t hard work. General as “the Darth Vader of the com- quite justify the build-up, but whatever: The team’s outsider triumph gives puter industry” (a reference that un- we are already hooked. Confessing to way to an unexpectedly mournful con- doubtedly aged better than he expect- his editor that he was having difficulty clusion. West himself is banished to a ed). Data General’s corporate culture capturing West, “whose special vanity marketing job in Japan. Kidder, wink- was defined in equal parts by thrift and had been to make himself mysterious ing at his name, compares West to a aggression. Kidder confides that Data to me as well as to his team of computer gunslinger, who dispatches the bad General’s spartan corporate offices were engineers,” Kidder had been advised to guys only to be run out of town by the engineered for rapid conversion to fac- “do a Gatsby on him.”4 very citizens he saved. “It was a sum- tory space even before he gets around to mer romance,” realizes West. “None of mentioning the lawsuit a rival firm filed 3: It Roots for the Underdogs it came out the way he had imagined it to accuse Data General of burning down Gripping stories often ask us to root would, but it was over and he was glad.” its factory. for underdogs to triumph against the When West reappears, Kidder stim- odds. Data General’s brutal corporate 4: It Captures the “Crunch” ulates our curiosity by presenting him culture gave West space to launch of Startup Development as a figure of mystery to his own team his project but deprived his team of Although Data General was a mature members: a CIA agent, a folksinger, a resources, leaving them in cramped company, the project was run more speed freak, even “a prince of dark- and uncomfortable conditions. Even like a startup. West and his lieuten- ness.” I was struck by the similarities pencils were in short supply. If you are ants staffed the team with young men with the technique F. Scott Fitzgerald thinking that a major minicomputer fresh from engineering school, lured used in The Great Gatsby to introduce firm ought to have been able to provide with the prospect of being able to de- his title character. Jay Gatsby, urbane pencils to the elite team building its sign a new computer architecture. host of fabulously swanky parties, next-generation system, you’d be right. They boasted of being “a place where turned out (spoiler alert) to be plain However, that team and its pencils people are really doing the next thing” old James Gatz of North Dakota, a were down in North Carolina, design- but cautioned that “there’s a lot of fast lovelorn bootlegger desperate to re- ing an ambitious all-new 32-bit archi- people in this group … a real hard job capture the attention of his lost sweet- tecture on a clean sheet of paper. Data with a lot of long hours.” In short: “tell heart. Less dramatically, corporate General had caught a bad case of what him that we only let in the best. Then computer engineer Tom West, turns Fred Brooks called the “second system we let him in.” It’s a classic example out to be Joseph Thomas West III, an syndrome.”4 The tactic of throwing of what software engineering writer engineer from a privileged back- out backward compatibility for a new Ed Yourdon called the “marine corps” ground who came late to corporate architecture worked for IBM with its justification for a “death march proj- life after taking a year off during col- legendary System/360 gamble, but has ect.”7 As Kidder put it, “It was kind of lege to play folk music, followed by failed far more often, for example with like recruiting for a suicide mission. seven slightly offbeat years building IBM’s own Future Systems project, at You’re gonna die, but you’re gonna die and delivering digital clocks for the least three times for Intel (iAPX 432, in glory.” JANUARY 2021 | VOL. 64 | NO. 1 | COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM 33 viewpoints Eagle is brought to life more slowly their own souls accumulated to bring ing a part of the machine or for run- than the team had promised but sooner the new machine to life. ning the debugging process, intro- than Data General had any right to ex- ducing a rich cast of clearly delineated pect. Inexperienced recruits were ma- 5: It Gets to Technology supporting characters with their own nipulated into “signing up” to aggres- Through People quirks and motivations. sive schedules, because an unreasonable How to make a reader commit to al- One such chapter, “The Case of the commitment given freely motivates most 300 pages of finely observed Missing NAND Gate,” begins by intro- more deeply than one imposed by man- business history of a company they ducing several engineers.