The Soul of a New Machine (1981)

I came at this book from an unusual perspective - I had more of an interest in Tom West as a person than the now-historical business side of things. It more or less did what I wanted it to do from that angle, although it's not actually a biography, but the book really shines in its capsule descriptions of all the members of the team.

I've worked in high-pressure tech industry jobs, and I'm sort of depressed to see that things were the same then as they are now - unrealistic deadlines, bullshit from the bottom to the top, burnout, "widow's" clubs among the families, etc. But the book presents them in a charitable yet accurate light, and as such I very much appreciated it.

It's fairly technical in many places. Kidder makes a gallant effort to find metaphors and explanations for the lay reader - as I am not actually a lay reader, I can't swear that they work, but I suspect they sort of don't. It would be totally possible, however, to skim those bits and still get the important parts of the story. ( )

I'm sure there are some people out there who find his writing too soft-hearted or lacking in technical detail, but for my money, Tracy Kidder just might be the best investigative journalist out there. In "The Soul of a New Machine" he traces the development of a computer -- code-named "Eagle" -- developed by the Data General company of Westborough, Massachusetts. As other reviewers have mentioned, Kidder's subject is not the machine itself but the people behind it -- driven, gifted computer designers working in what was then a fairly new and rapidly growing field. Kidder's ability to describe his subjects is unparallelled -- his sketches of the engineers he observed are both memorable and perceptive, and he's got a wonderful facility for divining what motivates each member of Data General's team. His writing's most remarkable quality, however, is the feeling of intimacy it transmits to his readers. The tech-heads Kidder covered poured every ounce of their energy into the Eagle, and "The Soul of a New Machine" does more than effectively record their hopes, ambitions, frustrations, and fears -- it also makes them seem comprehensible and emotionally accessible. One gets the feeling that the author didn't just report on his subjects' project, he suffered through it with them. This immediacy makes a real difference: it allows Kidder to take what might have been a dry, technical subject and wrings real drama from it. "The Soul of a New Machine" is so emotionally involving it reads something like a cliff-hanger. During the book's last few chapters, I earnestly hoped that those engineers would get their computer out the door and see it find a place in the wider world.

Some other reviewers have also described the book as a bit "dated," and well, yes, it is. After all, many of Kidder's subjects used pencil and paper to work out their computing designs. Still, it's an interesting and valuable historical document from an era when computers were a niche market restricted mostly to specialists rather than an everyday presence in the lives of billions of people. Kidder's patient and deliberate, taking readers of the late seventies, who were probably much less tech-savvy than today's average book-buyer, through the very basics of what was then modern computing. This is the real foundation of the computer age -- ones and zeros, basic chip design, and machine code -- and even in a world where applications seem to get much more attention than hardware, it was useful to read up on this stuff. Of course, now that we can fit the computing power of dozens of Eagles in our front pockets, it's hard not to think of Data General's engineers as cybertronic cavemen, but reading the relatively primitive methods they used to design a state-of-the-art computer in just a few short months makes their achievement seem all the more impressive. Recommended to computer enthusiasts and non-ethusiasts alike. ( )

Slightly dated, but so is yesterday. Good story, and definitely worth rereading

Kidder’s journalistic skills truly make themselves apparent in this book. He masterfully brings out the romance in a breakneck technical project whilst also highlighting the painfully high emotional cost and the human collateral damage. Thanks to the quality of narrative, he has immortalized the argument that even the grandest, most fiercely dedicated, and most battle-worn of engineers are still human beings with limits — a fact still ignored by engineering managers today.

The moribund term “death-march” is bitterly appropriate here, and despite luminary personalities like Tom trying to protect engineering from the business, the reality is that shit rolls downhill, and one is left wincing as the project decays into cruel and unusual product delivery. Kidder carefully offsets the fatiguing feeling of the daily struggle with regular intermissions offering layman’s descriptions of technical points, by offering insight into people’s “real” lives underneath the abstract engineering façade, and by painting the emergent beauty of a computer and its software being built.

This is a must-read for anyone who claims to be in any sort of leadership position on a technical project, particularly one where the solution space has not yet been explored. As much as they can appear to be so at times, engineers are not unfeeling superbots, and there are few books better written to remind us that even the most mechanistic of engineers have a soul to be acknowledged. ( )

One of my favorites- I worked on this machine when it came out