In regular columns across their surfaces lay small rectangular boxes. These boards were flat plates, each about the size of a shirt cardboard. He’d take one out, study it, make a few notes, and then put it back. “West spent the morning removing the VAX’s twenty-seven printed circuit boards. In one scene that illustrates Kidder’s mastery of the art of simplification, he wrote: The team Kidder is following are disassembling and studying the VAX. In the rush to complete the job, West says, “Not everything worth doing is worth doing well” and “if you can do a quick-and-dirty job and it works, do it.” West is known as “the prince of darkness” by employees, not surprisingly given his theories on the work. As though referencing Odysseus, the book begins with Data General’s hard-driving general manager, Tom West, on board his sailboat during a stomach-churning storm. (The industry began dying in the ’90s with the introduction of microprocessor-based PCs and workstations.) The Soul of a New Machine is the story of a team of designers at a small, upstart firm, Data General, developing its first 32-bit minicomputer, the Eclipse MV/8000, code-named “Eagle.”Īs Kidder conceived it, the book is a classic “quest” - complete with heroes battling obstacles on a tight timeline. Minicomputers were a cost-efficient way for businesses to computerize without buying huge and costly mainframes from IBM. Although The Soul of a New Machine chronicled cutting edge technology when it was published in 1981, today it’s a history book.įrom the mid-’60s until the late ’80s, minicomputers were a leading industry sector, led by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and its VAX machine. It launched Tracy Kidder’s career and won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Wired Magazine called it “the original nerd epic.” It displayed author Tracy Kidder’s gift for explaining technology to a general reader without being dismissed as simplistic (or, worse, wrong) by gearheads. BOOKS THAT MATTER: “The Soul of a New Machine”

The soul of a new machine