Such a huge backlog of books. Finally finished this one. Okay. This is a well written piece of tech journalism about the development of a new computer within the scope of a large company called Data General. The quotes that I found worth saving from here are either funny and relatable or notable for their reflection of current trends. The author, kind of implicitly in the title, strives to carve out an image of an entrepreneurial effort in which engineers are motivated by the design of the machine itself. As opposed to many other jobs in the late 1970s, they had an increased freedom and interesting technical challenges; but they also took lower pay and worked sixty hour weeks. The problems with this book could mostly be said to stem from the actual machine described: it's not exactly a major development, and brushed aside by Data General's CEO. The passion of the Microkids are for their community, lying in natural competitiveness, and occasionally for optimizations, but there's no groundbreaking developments going on here. At times it feels more like a portrait of the group's leader, Tom West. But I actually really like this character, and I haven't really read a lot of sociological analyses of computer programmers.

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When he was ten years old, Alsing remembered, he was given a book called All You Need to Know about Radio and TV. When he had read it from cover to cover, he really believed that he did know everything about radios and TVs. He didn't, of course, but thinking that he did had given him the confidence to take apart radios and TVs and in the process to learn what made them work. He had that experience in mind when he talked to Firth. "When Neal said he could do it in a couple of months, he was probably thinking back to how long term-projects in college took." Firth, Alsing reasoned, had not been performing make-work projects as many neophyte engineers do their first years out of school. He didn't know what he could not do. "I think that after our little talk, Neal had a picture in his mind that he knew all about simulators now. It was no problem. He could do it over the weekend."

Trying to name the social change he thought he'd seen beginning, West would say, "People were leaving Harvard and becoming masons." As for himself, he decided to become an engineer. Some of his friends were astonished. The very word, engineer, dulled the spirit. It was something your father might be interested in. "I think I wanted to see how complicated things happen," West said years later. 'There's some notion of control, it seems to me, that you can derive in a world full of confusion if you at least understand how things get put together. Even if you can't under stand every little part, how infernal machines get put together." A classmate at Amherst remembered West as "smart — off the charts — but also naive. No, not exactly naive, but like a boy — uh, romantic. He believed in pie in the sky ... On his own, near the end of college, he taught himself some digital electronics. But a few inquiries led him to feel that the interesting work in the space program was already spoken for. He managed to get a job with the Smithsonian Institution instead.

So he went to the local library and took out all of its modest collection of books about computers and studied them on the deck at the back of his house for about six weeks; then, when he felt he had mastered enough of the jargon to talk a good game, and in a hurry, lest he forget everything that he'd read, talked his way into a job at RCA.

It did not work out as he planned. "I thought I'd get a really dumb job. I found out dumb jobs don't work. You come home too tired to do anything," he said. He remembered a seemingly endless succession of meetings out of which only the dullest, most cautious decisions could emerge. He remembered watching himself play with his thumbs beneath the edges of conference tables for hours and hours. Near the end of his time at RCA he got to work on projects that interested him. He saw a few patents registered in his name.

... He spoke about the rapidity with which computers became obsolete. "You spend all this time designing one machine and it's only a hot box for two years, and it has all the useful life of a washing machine." He said, "I've seen too many machines." One winter night, at his home, while he was stirring up the logs in his fireplace, he muttered, "Computers are irrelevant."

... "Among those who chucked the established ways, including me, there's something awfully compelling about this," West said of building Eagle. "Some notion of insecurity and challenge, of where the edges are, of finding out what you can't do, all within a perfectly justifiable scenario. It's for the kind of guy who likes to climb up mountains."

Veres himself feels that by the time debugging begins, designs should be more nearly perfect than this one was. A bug in the logic of a design, though discovered and fixed in the lab, stands as a slight reproach to the designer. Not that Veres doesn't enjoy debugging. He just doesn't like mistakes. And as Rasala has noticed, he doesn't just work casually to find and fix a mistake, he attacks.

... Data General recruited Rosen by promising him interesting work, and he got it. The first truly commercial product he designed was something known as a cluster controller, a kind of computer terminal, which he called Hydra. After it had been built and shipped, a small microcode error cropped up in it, and Rosen's boss sent him to California to make the repair. Out west, Rosen was ushered into a room and saw a dozen people using the machine that he had designed. The sight made him tremble. It took his breath away. He felt scared. "My God!" he thought. "Don't use one of those. Why don't you use a real terminal?" He felt thrilled. "That's something I designed. That's my machine. That's not Data General's. That's me.

"You don't get to see that very often," Rosen said. "But that's the biggest satisfaction of all."

He was only twenty-two, and he had done it all — except that he had never helped to build a commercially important, big and brand-new computer. He expressed an interest in doing so, and the word got back to the Eclipse Group. They recruited him; he had fine credentials. Then, of course, everything went sour for him.

... What would obtain in the Eclipse Group also held at Special Systems. "There was no question of deadlines. You'd already missed it, whatever it was." He worked many eighty-hour weeks — without extra pay, of course, but that wasn't the issue. "I had a lot of control over the things I did, and the price was a lot of pressure. If I spent only a sixty-hour week, I felt intensely guilty."
He told himself that he was having the time of his life. During his second year at Special Systems, he began to remind himself of this with some regularity. "Josh," he would say to himself, "you're designing the sexy machines."
The dialogue with himself continued when he joined the Eclipse Group and began working on Eagle. "You've always revered the people who built the NOVA and the PDP-11. Now you're one of them. You're the guy you always wanted to be," he said in his mind.
"So why," he asked himself, "am I not happy?"
... Now he thought to himself: "I have no social life. Nothing." He looked back on his career and saw that ever since adolescence he had never strayed very far from work. He needn't have taken a job every summer; his parents would have given him spending money. But that was what he had done. "I'd been doing this all my life, it seemed. In college, you know, physics majors are masochists and proud of it. Constantly pulling all-nighters in the lab or the computer centers. But you find yourself becoming really sort of narrow." When he went to some of the parties that members of the Eclipse Group threw, he found himself and most everyone around him talking about computers. That was nothing new, but now he also found himself thinking: "This is a party. We're not supposed to be talking about work."

... As the debugging continued, he felt the pressure in his stomach. It hurt every day. This sort of work, even the occasional bad stomach, used to be fun. "Part of the fascination," he said, "is just little boys who never grew up, playing with Erector sets. **Engineers just don't lose that, and if you do lose it, you just can't be an engineer anymore**." He went on: "When you burn out, you lose enthusiasm. I always loved computers. All of a sudden I just didn't care. It was, all of a sudden, a job."

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...Since Wiener, practically every kind of commentator on modern society, from cartoonists to academic sociologists, has taken a whack at the sociology of computers. A general feeling has held throughout: that these machines constitute something special, set apart from all the others that have come before. Maybe it has been a kind of chronocentrism, a conviction that the new machines of your own age must rank as the most stupendous or the scariest ever; but whatever the source, computers have acquired great mystique. Almost every commentator has assured the public that the computer is bringing on a revolution. BY THE 1970s it should have been clear that revolution was the wrong word. And it should not have been surprising to anyone that in many cases the technology had served as a prop to the status quo. The enchantment seemed enduring, nevertheless. So did many of the old arguments.

Claims and counterclaims about the likely effects of computers on work in America had also abounded since Weiner. Would the machines put enormous numbers of people out of work? Or would they actually increase levels of employment? By the late seventies, it appeared, they had done neither. Well, then, maybe computers would eventually take over hateful and dangerous jobs and in general free people from drudgery, as boosters like to say. Some anecdotal evidence suggested, though, that they might be used extensively to increase the reach of top managers crazed for efficiency and thus would serve as tools to destroy the last vestiges of pleasant, interesting work.

A reporter who had covered the computer industry for years tried to sum up for me the bad feelings he had acquired on his beat. "Everything is quantified," he said. "Whether it's the technology or the way people use it, it has an insidious ability to reduce things to less than human dimensions." Which is it, though: the technology or the way people use it? Who controls this technology? Can it be controlled?

Jacques Ellul, throwing up his hands, wrote that technology operates by its own terrible laws, alterable by no human action except complete abandonment of technique. More sensible, I think, Norbert Wiener, prophesied that the computer would offer "unbounded possibilities for good and for evil," and he advanced, faintly, the hope that the contributors to this new science would nudge it in a humane direction. But he also invoked the fear that its development would fall "into the hands of the most irresponsible and venal of our engineers."

...Eagle was failing its Multiprogramming Reliability Test mysteriously. It was blowing away, crashing, going to never-never land, and falling off the end of the world after every four hours or so of smooth running.

..."Machines somewhere in the agony of the last few bugs are very vulnerable," said Alsing. "The shouting starts about it. It'll never work, and so on. Managers and support groups start saying this. Hangers-on say, 'Gee, I thought you'd get it done a lot sooner.' That's when people start talking about redesigning the whole thing."

the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team inside a company an entrepreneurial spirit, which was channeled in the right direction by constraints sent down from the top. But it seems more accurate to say that a group of engineers got excited about building a computer. Whether it arose by corporate bungling or by design, the opportunity had to be grasped. In this sense, the initiative belonged entirely to West and the members of his team. What's more, they did the work, both with uncommon spirit and for reasons that, in a most frankly commercial setting, seemed remarkably pure.

[In the Nature of Gothic] In the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, Ruskin believed, you can see the glorious fruits of free labor, given freely. What is usually meant by the term craftsmanship is the production of things of high quality; Ruskin makes the crucial point that a thing may also be judged according to the conditions under which it was built.

Presumably the stonemasons who raised the cathedrals worked only partly for their pay. They were building temples to God. It was the sort of work that gave meaning to life. That's what West and his team of engineers were looking for, I think. ...Many seemed to want to say that they had participated in something quite out of the ordinary...

Maybe in the late 1970s designing and debugging a computer was inherently more interesting than most other jobs in industry. But to at least some engineers, at the outset, Eagle appeared to be a fairly uninteresting computer to build. Yet more than two dozen people worked on it overtime, without any real hope of material rewards, for a year and a half; and afterward most of them felt glad. That happened largely because West and the other managers gave them enough freedom to invent, while at the same time guiding them toward success... He was always finding romance and excitement in the seemingly ordinary...

...He again poked his head up through the hatch. He was holding the engine's manual aloft. "This is a good manual. The only problem is, ummmmmmmh, it's not for this engine." ... West's head appeared in the hatchway, reading from the manual: " 'It is axiomatic that when a diesel engine fails while underway, that there is a fuel problem.'" He laughed, as if he had just read something funny. Again he was gone and again he reappeared, 'his time to spit out a mouthful of diesel fuel.

..."What motivates people?" he asked. He answered his own question, saying, "Ego and the money to buy things that they and their families want." It was a different game now. Clearly, the machine no longer belonged to its makers.

Somehow not so easy read. Not sure why. However, if you liked Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, you will like this book as well. The real story of Data General Eclipse MV/8000 computer design. Very detailed, deep and passionate.

I think I kinda understand how CPU works now.

I've been meaning to read this book for literally decades, ever since I first got involved in IT in the mid-1980s. I finally mooched a copy. Maybe it's too late to read it, since it's really history now rather than current affairs. It's still an interesting read though; you don't have to know anythong about computers to read it, because it's about the people in the team that built Data General's first 32-bit computer, using the latest techniques available at that time. They were passionate about what they were doing and the book details all the manouevring and office politics that went into getting a budget for the project, and getting the team to put their all into it, neglecting families, friends and hobbies. Kidder does an excellent job of explaining technical details in terms that a non-specialist can understand.

I did enjoy it because to tell the truth I hadn't really thought before about exactly how you design a new computer with only very limited tools to help you. The thought of having to fiddle about making all the connections on circuit boards with tiny bits of wire is mind-boggling. It must be quite different now, but I suspect the people haven't changed much.

If you want to read similar books about more recent inventions, I can recommend Robert X. Cringely's Accidental Empires, an entertaining and sometimes bitchy account about the development of the personal computer (in its widest sense), and John Naughton's A Brief History of the Future, an account of the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Both will give you a different insight into the computer in front of you.

I have a lot to say about this fantastic book. I am on a reading sprint right now though, so I'll probably put it up in a blog post and link it here later

This book was a trip for me. As a software developer myself this seemed to me so familiar and fresh (even if it tells a history of about 40 years ago!). Technology has changed a lot but the people who built it is the same. I could feel the tension and excitement throughout the history!

This was... fine, somewhere between 2 and 3 stars, but it's pleasant enough that I gave it 3. It's considered a classic of computing-industry nonfiction, and it won a Pulitzer, but I wonder to what degree it felt fresh and groundbreaking in 1981 in ways that seem fairly ordinary in 2018. To me it seemed like a pretty standard "whiz kids" tech story.

The book hits pretty much one note the entire time, which is to talk about how driven these young engineers are and how much sweat and toil they put into making their machine work. There is some technical explanation but not a lot, and I don't think someone who hasn't programmed or done electrical engineering will learn too much. Reading about the trials and tribulations is fun, but the focus is on the technical struggle and not the characters involved. Only a few individuals (West, Rasala, Rosen) stand out; the remaining engineers kind of blend together.

I don't know what things were like back then. But many of the tropes that Kidder implies are strange are now commonplace in the tech industry, and the tech industry itself is also so big and ubiquitous that everyone else knows about these tropes too. (One chapter speculating) For example: Data General's casual-dressed, shoot-from-the-hip attitude; arriving to work late and leaving very late, the frantic push to meet a shipping deadline; the "arrogant nerd" personality; burnout.

The writing is engaging and fast paced, keeping the reader moving, so reading it was enjoyable. But it was somewhat lacking in reward at the end.

Read this years ago. I remember enjoying it.

It is a testament to Tracy Kidder's skills as a writer that I found a book of ancient computer engineering to be a compelling read. The story of Data General's development of a 32-bit minicomputer was somehow rendered like an adventure story through a wild landscape filled with thrills and dangers and eventual reward.

I read this book as background reading for a trilogy of books I'm reviewing and so pleasant to find such enjoyment in my research.

Oh, and the book also won the Pulitzer Prize...

Portrayal of a high-pressure hardware development project. It's...fine. Most interesting bit is definitely at the end where Kidder muses about the telos of work, and why people might voluntarily give so much of themselves for a project. Ruskin thought that Gothic cathedrals had been built by people who saw meaning in their labour, something industrialisation had taken away from them. The development of this computer was mainly driven by employee enthusiasm, and remote managers relying on the "mushroom principle" (leave them in the dark, feed them manure, and watch them grow).

Shows the tech industry pretty much as it is today: mostly white/male, a world of affable smart nerds who enjoy what they do and work long hours out of personal interest in their work, not employer pressure. It's basically an anthropological study, written without much technical background (Kidder tries to convey any technical ideas by very simple analogies). He cites John McPhee as his* primary writing influence, and that kind of slow pensive writing might be better suited to writing about the outdoors than corporate IT.

*I thought I could add another to my quorum of books by female authors this year, but it turns out that Tracy is just one of those starchy WASP men's names, like Hilary or Lynn.

n  They were building temples to God. It was the sort of work that gave meaning to life. That's what West and his team of engineers were looking for, I think.n

An incredible account of what it feels like to work in the computer industry, an accurate description of computer architecture (that is still relevant today), and an all-around amazing book. Touches many aspects of hardware, management and the emotional intricacies of engineering.

On a personal note, to me, it captures the essence of computers and the people who make them. This was a very special read to me as a computer engineering undergraduate - a fantastic accomplishment that someone from a different field of expertise managed to grasp in such a beautiful way the art of the machine and the people working at the forefront of its development. I had a feeling from the first page, that I was going to like this book. It did not disappoint.

n  "The game of programming - and it is a game - was so fascinating. We'd stay up all night and experience it. It really is like a drug, I think."n

Sounds about right.

Read this book in that early 80's period, when I was pre-CSci at the U.. played a non-insignificant role in my deciding to switch careers. Not because I wasn't willing to work hard, but because the picture he painted was of very-realistic sounding imbalance. Long-term, structural imbalance and unwellness. And I knew myself well enough to know that that work environment wouldn't be in my best interest.

I have - in accounting - worked long hours sometimes, as many as 60 hour weeks repeatedly; sometimes 22 days in a row of 5-8 hour days (5 hours being on the weekend days), etc.. but the most ever was close to 100 hours a week for a period, and that was at an ISP, during a pre-merger period when other staff had already left. And from that ISP, and other computer-industry workplaces I saw over the years, I always felt the validity of what Kidder wrote in this book.

I still wish it could have been possible, I think it would have been a lot more interesting and rewarding (potentially), but I am glad not to have had those workplace pressures at that nature. So, in balance, very grateful to this book to have steered me away at that critical juncture.