The Soul of a New Machine

The Soul of a New Machine is the best book ever written about how computers actually get built, and it was written before most Americans had touched one. In 1978 Tracy Kidder embedded with a team at Data General, a scrappy minicomputer company in Massachusetts, as it raced to build a 32 bit machine, code named Eagle, to answer Digital Equipment's VAX before the company lost the industry's next generation. The official future was a different project in North Carolina; Eagle was the unglamorous insurance policy, assembled in a basement by engineers mostly a year or two out of school, and Kidder's subject is how their leader, the enigmatic Tom West, got two years of eighty hour weeks out of them for no bonus and no fame. The answer is the book's real discovery: signing up, the ritual by which an engineer accepts a piece of the machine as his own, after which nobody needs to order him to work nights, plus mushroom management, the dark and manure of deadlines, and the pure pinball prize of getting to do it again. Kidder makes microcode and bus architecture legible without condescension, but the machine is the occasion; the subject is devotion, burnout, and what work means when the work is invisible. The book won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the 1982 National Book Award, a double almost nothing wins, and it is still in print more than forty years on. Forty years of engineers have pressed it on new hires with the same words: this is still exactly what it is like.