The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder is a journalist and not an engineer, and that is why the book works. He spent time with a team at Data General, a Massachusetts minicomputer company, as they built a new 32-bit machine under heavy deadline pressure, and he wrote it as a story about people.

What it’s about

In the late 1970s, Data General needed an answer to the 32-bit machines from its rival, Digital Equipment Corporation. A group of young engineers, led by Tom West, built one in a basement lab. It became the Eclipse MV/8000. Kidder follows the project from its secretive start through the long hours, the improvisation, and the rivalry with another company project elsewhere.

The book is mostly about motivation. Why do talented people give up evenings, weekends, and sometimes much more to build something that will be sold under the company’s name and not theirs? Kidder’s answer, which is more observation than theory, is that they take on the hardest part of the problem and get absorbed in it. His phrase for volunteering to work that hard is “signing up,” and it is still quoted in engineering circles.

It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1982.

Why it belongs on coldboot

This is a book about hardware, from just before the period this site covers, but it set the pattern for nearly every later account of a technology team under pressure. If you read the 1980s articles and wonder what building those products felt like from the inside, this is the closest thing to an answer.

Keep in mind

It is narrative journalism and not a technical manual. Kidder explains the engineering well enough to follow, but the point is the people, and the view is largely the team’s own.

Edition linked: Back Bay Books paperback (2000).