Fantastic odyssey of bringing a new computer to life in the late 1970s. The metaphors and analogies for computer architecture are appropriate, approachable, and just plain awesome - I’ll be thinking about these explanations for a long time to come. Recommended for anyone who’s ever built anything with a computer and wants to go under the hood a bit deeper - no technical background required, but if you’ve got one, then you’ll dig this book even more.

Tremendous

Was het niet van de titel, die me deed denken aan futuristische sci-fi à la Ghost in the Shell en The Melancholy of Mechagirl, of van de boekomslag met zilverblinkende letters (en van de prijs, 2de-hands voor slechts € 0.50) dan had ik dit boek nooit gelezen, zelfs niet op aanraden van een boekenvriendin of -vriend. So it goes.
Het boek bestaat uit het feitelijke verslag van de ontwikkeling van een 32-bit pc (de Eclipse MV/8000) door een team ingenieurs, managers en programmeurs begin jaren 80. Klinkt niet erg sexy of spannend hé. In tegenstelling tot wat de titel deed vermoeden is het verhaal dus alles behalve futuristisch en sci-fi, het is geschiedenis en computer science. Dan lijkt (bagger) als Fifty Shades of Grey toch stukken spannender, maar...
The Soul of a New Machine bewijst de stelling: 'you can't judge a book by its subject'.
Hoewel het boek een feitelijk verslag is bevat het alles van een spannend en fictief avontuur. De setting, protagonisten, gebeurtenissen, conflicten, emoties... zijn met grote taalvaardigheid verweven tot een boeiend verhaal. Wie bovendien een basiskennis informatica bezit zal extra genieten van de technische aspecten. Termen als CPU, ALU of NAND gate kom je niet elke dag tegen in een goed boek. Geen paniek, ook wie geen computernerd is kan genieten van het boek daar de auteur veel aandacht besteedt aan de drijfveren, dromen, donkere kantjes, zwakheden, ja de ziel van de mensen die de machine bouwen. Hij beschrijft mooi hoe zij hun ziel in een machine leggen. Geef toe, dat klinkt toch wel lekker futuristisch en sci-fi voor een non-fictie boek.
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What a book. It'd be interesting to get this kind of journalistic treatment of any product launch; to see inside the process of Tom West and the early 1980s minicomputer world is such a treat. It's a fun and valuable look at an area of computer history that doesn't get a ton of attention.

It bears noting that there are almost no women in the whole book, outside of the saintly Rosemarie. That could be better! I would've loved to hear more, for example, about the one woman engineer on the development team. In that and a few other ways, this book shows its age.

If you're coming off this and want some fiction, this pairs well with Ellen Ullman's "The Bug."

If you want to know, how few managers with their nagging solves big problems. Read it.
A story set in Pre-PC Era shows us how managers were different from what we see today and how big organisations used to work.
I love how the story is told, you can feel that you were there when everything was executed.
Kudos Tracy Kidder

A Robert Caro like discerption of how a team of renegade engineers brought a new computer to the market.

It was sheer machoism, and perhaps the computer industry was much worse in the infancy.

Too long to be a book, though could have been a nice article.

What Kidder wrote about computer technology development in 1980 could have been written today about so much technology development. Makes it interesting, funny and human. Required reading for anyone in the field and recommended for everyone.

Fantastic!

Books written by journalists in general and non-fiction Pulitzer winners in particular are—in my experience—universally garbage, but this was a specific recommendation, so I thought I'd give it a try. I shouldn't have.

The Soul of a New Machine describes the development process of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000, but Kidder has no particular insight into the industry or any specific aspect of hardware development. Like most journalists, he does have a tremendous capacity for taking deeply shitty people at their word when it comes to their deeply shitty practices, though.†
He was obviously handed a large amount of technical information, and while he should be commended for not just cutting it out (even if his attempts to make it accessible are of dubious value), none of it adds anything to the narrative.

The reason this book was recommended to me was because the person who recommended it believes it gives a great impression of what this kind of deadline-bound creative development is (and, implicitly, should be) like, not just in hardware design, but in every sector that makes new things.
If that is true for you (it hasn't been for me), I can only feel sorry for you. Don't put up with that kind of bullshit, and definitely don't celebrate it. What the book describes is semi-voluntary slavery, and even Kidder recognises it as a recipe for an early burn-out.

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† Data General, as you may not remember, was notorious for its generally unpleasant business practices (towards its competitors, clients, and employees alike), and ultimately accomplished nothing of any lasting consequence before finally disappearing into EMC.

What an AMAZING book. Wish I had read it sooner...

This book is simply great. It captures working at a technology company: the long hours, no overtime, working for passion remarkably well. At the same time, it captures leadership and what effective leadership could look like without taking the credit for it.

Stay tuned for my eventual review in which I’ll discuss how the Data General playbook is still in use at today’s Silicon Valley tech companies.