Hard to believe that it's coming up for 35 years since the events in this book took place. It was a different time. A time when the frontiers in computer hardware were open and worth fighting for; when margins in hardware were, by present day standards, stratospheric, and when computer professionals/nerds/geeks were cheap and in it for the challenge. This is the true story of a small team of people with a common goal - to give birth to a new computer that will save a company. The different characters in the book have different perspectives, different drivers, but they all gave a part of themselves to see their baby born. The baby was the 32-bit Eclipse, (the now defunct) Data General's chance to survive a few more years in the nascent mini/micro computer industry. While the book has sufficient technical information to keep the casual geek interested, the real story is about the engineers working 100 hour weeks and how this project became a big part of their lives. Kidder has created a classic of the mini-computer era that has no equal.

Single-digits-year-old me really liked the title. So I read it.

It's a little hard not to view this work environment as toxic, despite the obvious love the author has for the project. Sadly, a lot of the love for a project like this one became the go-to idea that eventually fueled much that is worst in the tech industry. 70 hour work weeks as the expected norm? Check. In this book we have recent-grads who are exploited for their willingness to try anything-- which has now become using interns as slave labor. The vision of everyone one-day owning a personal computer that they can carry around with them? Check. The myopia of loving work on a great project with no broader understanding or concern for how that technology is going to be used? Check.

In this era of big beige clunkers, glowing green type, and rainbow cord-spaghetti were the seeds of the world we know and love. And love to hate.

West would sit at his desk and stare for hours at the team’s drawings of the hardware, playing his own mind games with the results of the other engineers’ mind games. Will this work? How much will this cost? Once, someone brought a crying baby past his door, and afterward it took him an hour to retrace his steps through the circuit design he had been pondering. Laughter outside often had the same effect, once in a while it made his hands shake with rage — especially if he didn’t like the design he’d been staring at.
West usually drove out of Westborough fast after work. “I can’t talk about the machine,” he said one evening, bent forward over the steering wheel. “I’ve gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I’m gonna go mad.”

In 1981 Tracy Kidder penned this non-fiction narrative and won the Pulitzer Prize. The story is about a group of engineers, who work for Data General outside Boston, as they spend a year designing a better mini-computer.

You probably haven’t heard of Data General because they never got as big as IBM, Cray, NEC and Data General missed the personal computing revolution that unfolded in the immediate years after this book was published.

This is not a dramatic book about overpaid and soul-less individuals at high powered tech companies. Nor is it a book about visionaries like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

No this book is quite literally about a group of a dozen engineers led by their veteran manager Tom West. This group works at the Boston branch of Data General. They are given a year to build a better and faster version of their minicomputer so they can get a leg up on their rival DEC and DEC’s newly released VAX minicomputer. The team is to employ some secrecy initially and not to let a parallel team at the headquarters in North Carolina know what they are working on. In part because they were already told their project is redundant.

Although the topic may seem mundane to some, Kidder’s storytelling and narrative is genuine, well paced and compelling in the human sense. The author was embedded in the group so we get a linear narrative and first hand observations on the quest to build a new computer in twelve months. We also get to know the people and their personalities.

As far as nerd-fare there is a bit related to circuit design but not enough to spoil the story. Maybe a few mentions of NAND gates and a good deal of discussion on related computer components. I would say one does not have to be tech savvy to love the book but a curiosity about how organizations work and what motivates scientists and engineers is necessary.

5 stars. Excellent read. Although the industry around mini-computers died decades ago, this narrative is arguably the best literary style writing on tech that I have read in years. I am adding several other Tracy Kidder books to my to-read shelf. The story is four decades old, but this should be required reading for anyone in the tech industry.

This book was a re-read, having first read it when it came out in 1982.

The book is superbly written, looking at the computer era of the 1970s. It has a "pre-historic" feel to it, given that the mini-computers they were designing and building back then would equate to the average desktop these days. But for a book on a relatively dry topic -- computer engineering -- it is good for several reasons. The engineers put their heart and soul into a machine. There is a competition between companies over a product. And an internal competition within one company to build the best product.

For a look at the era that led that way from mainframes to mini computers and onto to the personal computer, this book is probably the best out there. It was good to read it again after so many years.

Its pretty funny how much of this book Halt and Catch Fire ripped off. Season 2 was pretty good though there was too much drama

Some times fascinating others dreadfully dull (the debugging part) but always a worthwhile read. If you want to know about the early days of PC construction or are curious how much/little has changed this is for you. Outdated in ways but still relevant in others.

(4.0) Snapshot in time in the history of computing

Retells the story of the development of the first 32-bit minicomputer offering from Data General (I'm not nerdy/old enough to really know about them). Much of it centers on the defiant attitude that the engineers took to build this computer even when it appeared that Data General was doing its best not to make it happen (relatively low pay, few resources, few engineers, crazy deadline). But they do (only about 50% over schedule), through allnighters, double-shifts, worked weekends and a heck of a good bunch of engineers.

Kidder delves into some of the technical problems and solutions they encountered, which were interesting. But the most interesting thing for me was that this was right around the time that marked the end of the ability for a single engineer to really know the entire CPU...they're getting into the territory where there just need to be some black boxes that you know about but know little of in order to get everything to work together.

One other interesting section is towards the end when Kidder tries to debunk the notion of a "computer revolution". Just ten years later, he could probably see that he was just witnessing the very beginning of a series of revolutions.

Well written, interesting, I'll probably try another Tracy Kidder sometime soon. Anyone have a strong recommendation?

This book spoke to me right from the intro.
"[The book's title implies] something about the collective character and effort of a group of people who worked only party for their pay, most of them reveling in the difficulty of their circumstances and the complexity of their task, to create something that they knew was transitory. As Camus said of Sisyphus, one must imagine them happy."

About 6 years ago, a sort of scandal rocked the gaming industry related to a blog post by a woman known as "EASpouse". The blog post criticized EA's labor practices at the time, which required employees to work massive amounts of unpaid overtime, as they were salaried employees. By massive, I mean about 12-16 hour days, 6 days a week, regularly. This was a big deal among gamers, because very few of us had ever had the opportunity to peek behind the curtain like this. It was likely that most of us viewed game development with a variation of the way that Roald Dahl as a child imagined the inside of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory near the boarding school he attended (which later led to Charlie & the Chocolate Factory).

The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder shows that such working conditions are nothing new. The book follows the development process of Data General's micro-computer (sort of like a rack mounted server, except it's the size of the whole unit, but essentially only being one of the server nodes), that would be a successor to their Eclipse line of microcomputers, code named the Eagle, and later released as the MV/8000. The book goes into both the personal and technical aspects of the development process, profiling the various men (and a few women) involved in the project, and giving a description of the technical aspects of the process for the layman.

While the technical bits (pardon the pun), are enjoyable, the book's strength, and where it spends most of its time, is in profiles of the people. The book paints a bleak picture of the inner workings of Data General. The working conditions at Data General, particularly on this project, are brutal. Much as with EA Spouse, employees are salaried, with no overtime pay, and work 12-16 hour days, 6 days a week. As the project goes on, project leads and younger employees are worn down. Often, employees at Data General observe that the company brings in a lot of new fresh recruits, and few stay at the company after they turn 30. Many of these new recruits drop out for various reasons, and often employees discuss the company's sweat-shop like working conditions. As the project moves into the heat of summer, the air conditioning breaks, turning their windowless basement office into a sweltering oven, which they can't even leave the door open for, for security reasons. Only after the employees strike do they fix the air conditioning.

By the end of the book, several of the project leads, themselves burned out, leave the company, and while some of the employees on the Eagle team stay on, many more have left.

Tracy Kidder got an impressive amount of access at Data General when he wrote this book, and while he's honest and truthful about what happened there, Data General, at least to my 21st century mind, comes out of this book smelling like shit. I base this solely on what Data General does, and I know this because Kidder doesn't whitewash - he thankfully calls it right down the middle.

While the book is never accusatory, it makes clear that Data General is a predatory employer. It preys on young, semi-idealistic college Engineering graduates, who don't have a lot of job experience and are looking more for interesting problems to solve, interesting work to do, than a big paycheck. They promise them interesting problems, and briefly, very briefly, warn them that there will be long hours and possibly a limited social life, that this job will become their life. To meet the deadlines required of them they will have to give up friends, family, and the outside world, living only the job, for months or years at a time. Plus, because they're salaried, despite all the hours they get that would be overtime, they're only making their standard pay grade.

It chews up 22-24 year old kids, and spits them out at 30, burnouts who had great potential, but were consumed by their jobs. They don't say if many of these former employees stay in the industry, and some certainly do - Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes and current Chief Software Architect at Microsoft is a Data General veteran. However, those who leave the industry with a sour taste in their mouth will probably leave worse off then they would be if they worked somewhere else. Had they been actually paid overtime, they could have possibly built a nest egg that could have allowed them to retire early, or to at least take their time looking for work elsewhere.

While some poor decisions related to processor architecture helped to kill Data General right before the dawn of the 21st century, it is my suspicion that the boom in Silicon Valley may have inspired a brain drain. Nicer weather, a less oppressive corporate culture. For people who wanted more money, there was the change to come in on the ground floor of companies which had the potential to be worth millions and get significant stock options. For those who preferred challenge, they could face whole new challenges when designing new systems and new architectures at the new companies in the Valley.

In summary, the book is a high resolution snapshot of the early days of the computer industry, before the internet started to permeate our lives in subtle ways - computerized tax processing, credit cards, ATM machines, and so on, leading up to the more overt ways it would later find its way in - Bulletin Board Services, E-Mail, and finally, proper web pages. People interested in the history of the computer industry will certainly find this fascinating. People who don't care about the history of computing can still find something in the profiles of the people in this project, and how the project's process slowly wears them all down.

I read this many years ago and many books ago. But it made a big impression on my younger self about the quest for something bigger than yourself. You don't do something for money or glory, you do it for the deep internal feeling of accomplishment.

Four stars is maybe too many, three too few for this book. At times it's fascinating, but at others it's very turgid. Kidder goes into (I feel) completely unnecessary detail to explain the complexity involved in designing a computer. I have a degree in electronics and a masters in computing. I've used boolean logic to design logic circuits. I've written code in machine code. I've designed an operating system. And even I found these explanations tedious and boring. I get that he was trying to give the reader a sense of the conflict and tension involved in developing a machine. But for me it didn't work.
Nevertheless, I persisted because there was enough to keep me reading.

This book made me very very happy.

Tracy Kidder gets you supremely invested in not just the engineering challenge of making the Eagle at Data General in the late 70s, but also in every single person involved in the process. The book’s focus on individual experiences that made this stubborn band of engineers tick and devote all of themselves to building a computer, from design to debugging in a very short span of time left me teary-eyed.

It shows through every page how much time Tracy Kidder spent with the team that was actually building the machine. He chronicled their progress, not shying away from the minutiae of computer architecture concepts. For someone who was once deep in love with Computer Architecture, reading the book was an emotional experience.

I’m glad I did not read this book earlier and I’ll be sure to come back to it again in the future.