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 engineers to prototype a , 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

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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 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.”

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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. Kidder sketch- agement. “Signing up required, of hadn’t heard of, focused on the cre- es the lives, habits, and appearances of course, that you fervently desire the ation of a computer they would never Ken Holberger (“Chief Sergeant Detec- right to build your machine and then see, interspersed with technical de- tive of the Hardy Boys” who “couldn’t you do whatever was necessary for suc- scriptions of , caching, and look messy if he tried” but “doesn’t cess, including putting in lots of over- instruction formats that might have waste time listening to people who time, for no extra pay.” The novice engi- been more at home in a computer ar- aren’t making good, relevant sense”), neers are granted large responsibilities chitecture textbook than a gripping Jim Veres (whose “stern glare … makes and the freedom to follow their instincts. best seller? Kidder succeeds by telling some people nervous. His managers’ Young men “dribble away” pieces of us first about people, not about ma- confidence in him is tempered only by their lives as they battle to prove them- chines, investing us enough in them their feeling that he works too hard. selves. Some wilt under the pressure; and their work to follow as he moves That is how they express it”) and Jim those that remain work frantically and deep into descriptions of the prob- Guyer (an asthmatic mountaineer who effectively. The hardware team (‘The lems they were grappling with. People “seems in his busyness, among the Hardy Boys’) and the microcode devel- have changed much less than com- happiest of the group”). Kidder follows opers (‘The Microkids’) battle constant- puters over the last 40 years so this their interactions while troubleshoot- ly and informally against each other to material remains gripping today. ing a problem, observing the feelings of add and remove hardware capabilities When reading or watching the sto- each toward possible flaws in their own from the specification. Together, they ries of the computer industry’s most boards. We care about the bug because take the computer from conception to successful men we know all the end- we see how much it matters to these en- prototype hardware in six months. Then ings. Each retelling of the story of Steve gaging characters and to the unseen they have to make it work. Jobs is like riding a rollercoaster: we narrator who leads us confidently What was the “soul” referenced in hurtle along a fixed track past expected through passages such as “The diag- the book’s attention-grabbing title? triumphs and tragedies. In contrast, nostic program originally puts the tar- Natalie Angier, an early reviewer, Kidder tells an unfamiliar story, tightly get instruction at address 21765, and claimed that the “soul of a new machine, focused in time and place yet larger then, sometime later on, it moves the says Kidder, is nothing more than the than any of its individual players. target instruction to 21766. But the IP collective soul of those who put the ma- In the book’s most famous passage, never gets word of the change, though chine together.” That’s plausible, West has a friend sneak him into a data the System Cache does.” though Kidder notably declined to room where a VAX is installed to get a By the end of the book we know “say” this directly. The closest he feel for the machine he is trying to beat. about microcode, bits and bytes, Bool- comes, which is not very, is describing Lifting the covers of its central process- ean algebra, what happens when an in- a home workshop, full of power tools ing unit he counts 27 printed circuit struction is executed (in some detail), and carpentry equipment, as “a win- boards: “Looking into the VAX, West had , debugging, di- dow on West’s soul”? Nevertheless, his imagined he saw a diagram of DEC’s cor- agnostics, emulation, and the Adven- title made me think of the old story of porate organization. He felt that VAX was ture game. In his Times review, Florman the Golem, animated by magic but cre- too complicated. He did not like, for in- noted that while these descriptions ated by, and enslaved to, human will. stance, the system by which various parts “did not significantly increase” his As one of the engineers explained, “I of the machine communicated with “own very superficial knowledge” the don’t have to get official recognition each other; for his taste, there was too “uninitiated will find these brief pas- for anything I do. Ninety-eight percent much protocol involved. He decided that sages abstruse but not bewildering, un- of the thrill comes from knowing that VAX embodied flaws in DEC’s corporate fathomable but not boring.” the thing you designed works, and organization. The machine expressed Kidder’s ability to hold our interest is works almost the way you expected it that phenomenally successful compa- aided by another structural similarity would. If that happens, part of you is in ny’s cautious, bureaucratic style.” with Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece: a that machine.” Writing on the front Many readers were tantalized by narrator defined primarily by his obses- page of the New York Times Book Re- the idea of computer architecture as a sion with the man of mystery. Kidder view, Samuel . Florman called the en- creative medium in which experts acknowledges his own ongoing pres- gineers “fanatics, but not purists.”3 could read traces of individual flare ence with phrases such as “I saw them Perhaps their many individual sacri- or, as here, a conservative organiza- all collected once … during a fire drill,” fices, of marriages, mental stability, tional culture. Most chapters tell us a or “West said years later,” or “I saw youth, and health, amounted to a ritual piece of the story from the viewpoint him at one of the team’s parties” but through which sundered fragments of of engineers responsible for design- refuses to make himself a character.

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That is a contrast with the work of flashier proponents of 1970s “new journalism” such as Tom Wolfe, au- thor of vivid accounts of the Ameri- Further Reading can space program and the worlds I will be tackling two other landmark studies of the culture of IT work, Steven Levy’s Hackers and Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine in later columns, along of car enthusiasts, or Hunter S. with the recent TV series Halt and Catch Fire. In the meantime, Soul may leave Thompson who made his own erratic you hungry for closely observed studies of development projects. behavior the center of every story. I can recommend Fred Moody’s I Sing the Body Electronic (Viking Penguin, 1995), about a year spent with a Microsoft group developing multimedia CD Kidder has called this the “first-per- products, and G. Pascal Zachary’s Show Stopper! (Free Press, 1994) about the son minor” or “reasonable person” creation of Windows NT. Michael Lewis is an outstanding writer. Sadly The New technique of narration, in which New Thing (Norton, 1999), which follows Netscape co-founder Jim Clark as he “not much about the narrator is re- pitches half-baked healthcare marketplace and builds a giant robot yacht, is not one of his best but it is still readable and insightful. vealed, including the narrator’s opin- Writers have seemed less likely to embed themselves in computer projects ions.”4 Stripping his in-book presence recently, perhaps because companies have become increasingly secretive. of most identifying marks, to leave a Masters of Doom (Random House, 2003) is based on interviews rather than direct observation but still gives a vivid account of the testosterone-soaked development person-shaped avatar, helps us to of breakthrough action games Doom and Quake. Jason Schrier’s Blood Sweat imagine ourselves in Kidder’s empty and Pixels (Harper Paperbacks, 2017) is a collection of grim short stories versus shoes as they move through the base- Kidder’s elegiac novel, with each chapter looking at a different video game project. ment or follow West home. We come Thomas A. Bass’s The Eudaemonic Pie (Houghton Mifflin, 1985) tells the inside story of an eccentric Californian team building shoe-mounted computers to identify with the narrator’s only and radio links to predict the destination of a ball bouncing on a roulette table. defined characteristics: initial igno- For memoirs focused on product-based startups, try Jerry Kaplan’s Startup rance, growing fascination, and (Houghton Mifflin, 1994) about a pen computing pioneer crushed by Microsoft, dogged pursuit of understanding. Charles Ferguson’s judgmental High Stake, No Prisoners (Crown Business, 1999) about a web editing package sold to Microsoft, and Michael Wolff’s Burn Rate (Simon & Schuster, 1998) in which a gossipy journalist describes 6: It Exposes the Materiality his largely unsuccessful efforts to obtain millions of dollars from venture of Computing capitalists. Reflecting the mood of their era, all three focus more on finance and management than on engineering. Kidder calls Data General’s products “machines” as often as “computers” and chose the word “machine” for his thing was,” Kidder continues, “wheth- 7: It’s Unashamedly Masculine title. In 1979, computers were built on er a car’s engine of a computer, did not This is, as you have surely already real- a scale where engineers could probe matter; but since computers were ized, a remarkably and unselfcon- and rewire each logical pathway, giv- among the most complex of all man- sciously masculine book—which helps ing Kidder something material to de- made things, they had seemed to him, it appeal to men and to those comfort- scribe. That is a contrast to our current he said, to pose interesting challeng- able with the dominant traditions of discourse in which “the digital” is as- es.” The main story ends when the pro- American literature. While computers sumed to be invisible and immaterial. totype is “wheeled down the hall to were new and unfamiliar, American lit- Early like DEC’s PDP- Software.” Kidder barely mentions this erature had a long tradition of celebrat- 8 and Data General’s Nova, cheap and less-tangible side of the project, which ing the rugged masculinity of civil engi- small in comparison to mainframes, accounted for more than half of the to- neers taming the Western landscape were made possible by a stream of in- tal development work. and the resourcefulness of pioneers novations to package and assemble A single Eagle would sell for a quar- able to fix or adapt machinery to their electronics more efficiently. By 1979, ter of a million dollars and could sup- needs. Such men were also expected to the Eagle team was building computer port dozens of simultaneous users, be taciturn, emotionally restrained, logic mostly out of chips, rather than each on a separate video terminal. and hard to know. Perhaps overcom- discrete transistors and resistors. Yet Mass-produced computers, including pensating for the growing association despite its innovative use of Program- the Apple II and TRS-80, had been sold of computing with nerds, Kidder cele- mable Array Logic chips for custom to consumers and hobbyists since brated men doing guy things to an ex- logic the Eagle’s central processing 1977. But Soul ignores them, as did tent that must have seemed old fash- unit still filled many circuit boards. DEC and Data General during that pe- ioned even in 1981. Kidder emphasizes continuities be- riod. Personal computers still seemed West draws an organization chart tween tinkering with broken machines, like toys, and the chip technology of on a whiteboard, then puts an X over a a common activity in the 1970s, and the era was several years away from be- rival manager, saying “This guy disap- the work of the engineers as they close- ing able to create a high-performance pears in time.” The Eagle group them- ly observe Eagle’s functioning with log- 32-bit microprocessor. More funda- selves come to feel like throwbacks to ic probes, adding wires or tweaking cir- mentally, the shift to standard proces- an earlier, less bureaucratic kind of cuits to fix tiny errors in the design. sors stripped the heart out of computer engineering, joking about ordering West boasted “I can fix anything,” engineering. A few years later, West dinosaur T-shirts for the team and which Kidder documents for a diesel spoke dismissively of “all these people complaining that “beating people up engine, televisions, clocks, furniture, a who are putting 68000s on a board and didn’t seem to get results anymore.” record player, and a house. “What that calling it a computer.”5 After all the mythologizing, it was a

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8: It Dramatizes Ordinary Engineering Work Computing was Eagle fared well after it reached mar- a sideshow ket, as the Eclipse MV/8000. It and its successors sustained Data General for Distinguished 40 years ago. years. The company was saved, kind Today Apple, of, though it never returned to its glory Speakers days of industry leading growth rates Amazon, Microsoft, and profit margins. Before long the Program and Alphabet entire minicomputer industry was crumbling. In 1999, Data General was are the first gobbled up by EMC for its storage tech- A great speaker trillion-dollar nology. By then even DEC, once second companies. only to IBM, had concluded its slow can make the decline with absorption by PC manu- Technology facturer Compaq. In time, all empires difference between turn to dust. and money The work of these engineers is chal- a good event and are inseparable. lenging and difficult to understand, but Kidder treats them as skilled prac- a WOW event! titioners of a difficult craft rather than world-shaking genius innovators. You might complain that Kidder wasted Students and faculty his talent on the wrong story, that he should have spent the late-1970s lurk- can take advantage of shock when I found a YouTube video of ing in a garage in Silicon Valley rather West helping to introduce a successor than a basement in Massachusetts. If ACM’s Distinguished to the Eagle in 1990: an apparently cha- you have heard of Steve Wallach, Carl Speakers Program risma-free middle aged engineer Alsing, Ed Rasala, or even Tom West droned through technical specifica- himself it is almost certainly because to invite renowned tions and corporate jargon, sweating in of their appearance in the book, de- thought leaders in his short-sleeve shirt and tie. spite their many accomplishments at Their jobs required them to sacrifice firms like Convex and Alliant. Person- academia, industry or downplay any commitment to family ally, I am glad Kidder told the story he and government to or human relationships. Kidder men- did, looking at a part of the computer tions in passing that one female engi- industry that was far larger at the time deliver compelling and neer was hired, Betty Shanahan. We and remains more representative of learn only that her husband was unhap- engineering practice. insightful talks on the py to be left doing the laundry and that Novelists know that ordinary lives most important topics she was given a joke award for “putting are full of hidden drama, but most tech- up with a bunch of creepy guys.” Even- nology journalism chases stories of ex- in computing and IT tually Shanahan got tired of putting ceptional success. Reading tributes to today. ACM covers the up, becoming an advocate for diversi- the book by engineers, I am struck by ty as executive director of the Society how often they note triumphs and trag- cost of transportation of Women Engineers. Today there edies in their own careers that parallel for the speaker to might still be only one woman on the those experienced by Kidder’s charac- team, but a modern author would surely ters. One was hit by a visceral sense of travel to your event. center a chapter on her. “grim familiarity” when he encountered We learn far more about Rosemary a passing reference to the killing of a be- Searle, the project’s secretary and sur- loved project during a “big shootout at rogate mother to its young men. She HoJo’s.” “If you haven’t yet had your speakers.acm.org tells Kidder that West “never put one own shoot-out at HoJo’s,” he warned, “it restriction on me … he let me go out is regrettably coming; may your career and see what I could get done.” When be blessed with few such firefights!”2 I wrote about the creation of ENIAC, Perhaps Kidder was really describing Kidder’s sensitivity to Searle’s contri- himself when he noted that West “was butions reminded me to highlight always finding romance and excitement what little information I could find on in the seemingly ordinary.” His next Isabelle Jay, its secretary and its lon- book, after all, discovered equal wonder gest serving full-time member. in the building of a single house.

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9: It Makes Engineers The founders and early investors in had no idea how to shape them into a Seem Pure and Noble Data General got rich, but not the engi- publishable story. Richard Todd, his Kidder invokes Victorian critic John neers who sustained its growth. Were implausibly sympathetic editor at The Ruskin’s romantic idea that in build- they noble, or just exploited? Kidder Atlantic Monthly (and West’s former ing Europe’s great cathedrals, ancient may have romanticized the motivations college roommate) imposed many craftsmen experienced “the sort of work of his characters. Twenty years ago, rounds of rejection and revision while that gave meaning to life.” According to Wired magazine found most of them Kidder fitfully learned his trade. Kidder, the engineers likewise “did the working in senior roles at startups. Some How, then, could Kidder suddenly work, both with uncommon spirit and had become rich.6 Yet I am myself just produce a masterpiece? Kidder dedicat- for reasons that, in a most frankly com- romantic enough to fear that something ed Soul to Todd, who undoubtedly de- mercial setting, seemed remarkably important was lost. Tom West’s melan- served it. Yet Kidder’s sudden growth as pure.” None of Kidder’s characters be- choly pride at the end of the book is sure- a writer owed something to his immer- come spectacularly rich or expected to, ly more representative of the experience sion in the culture of engineering. In though they had hoped vainly for some of most development teams than the 1982, newly laden with accolades, he ap- financial recognition. When the team’s world-changing success and unimagi- peared with West at the Computer Mu- success went unrewarded with stock nable riches that dominate the more fa- seum in Boston. “In some sense,” Kid- options or bonuses, Kidder likened the miliar stories of Gates, Jobs, and Zucker- der explained, “writing a book is like rewards of computer engineering to berg. In fact, many teams are disbanded building a computer.”5 He had wit- those of pinball: the only thing you can before their work is done. Almost every nessed the profoundly creative nature of win is a chance to play the game again. component part of a software or hard- the design process, the aesthetic quali- Key members of West’s team leave Data ware system is invisible to the world, the ties of good engineering, and the pure General after he is banished to Japan, quality of its execution and elegance of joy of finding an elegant solution to a looking to play their next game of pin- its design known only to its creators. If a hard problem. As Soul took shape, Kid- ball elsewhere. system passes into the world the quality der spent a long confinement in Todd’s Late in the book, a unionized techni- of that work will be one of many factors office, spreading typewritten draft pages cian drops his pay stub into a trash bas- deciding whether it thrives or is quickly in piles on its floor to prune and rear- ket. A senior engineer thereby discovers forgotten. Systems are often doomed by range them. Todd sometimes lifted that the technician is making twice his bad marketing, undercapitalization, prized passages to deliver the crushing own pay, thanks to overtime. His super- changing customer tastes, or an idea news: “you could do without this.” Kid- visor burns the evidence, “so that the that was ahead of its moment. I hope der then “began to learn a skill … how to troops wouldn’t see it.” The sacrifices of that today’s developers retain enough fall out of love with my own words,” so the engineers seemed even purer in of the old ethic of pinball to find an in- that he could eliminate good material contrast with the sales manager whose trinsic satisfaction in difficult work well that was “at odds with the whole.” declaration on the final page that hu- done, so that they don’t feel worthless if West’s team had likewise begun with mans are motivated by “ego and the the industry eats their youth without architectural decisions, ruthlessly sub- money to buy things that they and their paying out a financial jackpot. suming the parts to the whole. Studying families want” reads like blasphemy. the engineer’s craft, Kidder had learned Kidder finishes the book with: “It was a 10: It Is Beautifully Engineered something about his own. His unique different game now. Clearly the machine Above all, Soul is an extraordinarily well- fusion of engineering and literature has no longer belonged to its makers.” crafted book. That means more than just outlasted the MV/8000 and the mini- Computing was a sideshow 40 years well-turned sentences and snappy ob- computer industry. I expect it to outlast ago. Today Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, servations. Each finely tuned section fits the PC and the smartphone too. and Alphabet are the first trillion-dol- smoothly into the structure of the book. lar companies. Technology and mon- Kidder’s pacing is flawless, his character References 1. Brooks, F.P., Jr. The Mythical Man Month: Essays on ey are inseparable. Instead of pinball, beats impeccably timed, and he man- Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1975. a technology career is more like a slot ages to make a mass of contradictions 2. Cantrill, B. Reflecting onSoul of a New Machine. The Observation Deck (blog), (Feb. 10, 2019); https://bit. machine where the goal is to pull on seem like a faithful portrait of a complex ly/35KX3fN 3. Florman, S.C. The Hardy Boys and the Microkids Make a the handle repeatedly and hope to world rather than a failure of craft. West Computer. New York Times Book Review (Aug. 23, 1981), 1. win a financial jackpot. Intel routine- remains unknowable and paradoxical. 4. Kidder, T. and Todd, R. Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction. Random House, NY, 2013. ly granted stock options to engineers. The engineers are both exploited and 5. Kidder, T. and West, T. Inside ‘The Soul of a New Machine.’ Adopted by software firms like Micro- given an enviable opportunity for mean- The Computer Museum Report (Spring 1983), 5–8. 6. Ratcliffe, E. O, Engineers! Wired (Dec. 2000), 356–367. soft, this became the standard way of ingful work. The project was a rebellion, 7. Yourdon, E. Death March: The Complete Sofware luring engineering talent to success- tacitly orchestrated by senior managers. Developer’s Guide to Surviving “Mission Impossible” ful companies, creating millionaires Kidder’s only previous book was, in Projects. Prentice Hall, 1997. in unprecedented numbers. Other de- his own estimation, a miserable fail- Thomas Haigh ([email protected]) is a professor velopers, seeking a longer shot at ure. Kidder has described his 1970s of history at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and a Comenius visiting professor at Siegen University. His next greater wealth, sought stakes in the self as “plainly ambitious” yet “young book, A New History of Modern Computing will appear startups that dominant firms increas- beyond his years.” As a journeyman with MIT Press later this year. ingly treated as a source, via acquisi- freelance magazine writer, he churned tion, of products and staff. out words with “boundless energy” but Copyright held by author.

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