Soul of a New Machine

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More About This Book

Overview

Computers have changed since 1981, when Tracy Kidder memorably recorded the drama, comedy, and excitement of one companys efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations. The Soul of a New Machine is an essential chapter in the history of the machine that revolutionized the world in the twentieth century.

Data General was in danger of losing its edge in the high technology war. Thirty wiz kids — design engineers — were given the job of building a computer more advanced than anything that then existed — and under an absolutely impossible deadline. A Pulitzer Prize-winner from Tracy Kidder.

Editorial Reviews

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
All of Mr. Kidder's hopes for his book have been fulfilled. It does give us a vivid picture of the computer business. . . . But I have to emphasize that what I admired most about such parts of The Soul of a New Machine was the simply but gratifying fact that I understood them.
— The New York Times
Library Journal
Pulitzer Prize winner Kidder's 1981 volume was published when mini-supercomputers were still the stuff of science fiction. How the world has turned. Though technology has grown immeasurably since then, this volume still serves as an interesting history of the machine that conquered the world.
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
Library Journal
Pulitzer Prize winner Kidder's 1981 volume was published when mini-supercomputers were still the stuff of science fiction. How the world has turned. Though technology has grown immeasurably since then, this volume still serves as an interesting history of the machine that conquered the world.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780316491976
  • Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
  • Publication date: 6/1/2000
  • Pages: 320
  • Sales rank: 169,177
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.25 (h) x 0.75 (d)

Meet the Author

Tracy Kidder
Tracy Kidder
Tracy Kidder has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award, among other literary prizes. The author of The Soul of a New Machine, House, Among Schoolchildren, Old Friends, and Home Town, Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

HOW TO MAKE A LOT OF MONEY

For a time after the first pieces of Route 495 were laid down across central Massachusetts, in the middle 1960s, the main hazard to drivers was deer. About fifteen years later, although traffic went by in processions, stretches of the highway's banks still looked lonesome. Driving down 495, you passed some modern buildings, but they quickly disappeared and then for a while there would be little to see except the odd farmhouse and acres of trees. The highway traverses some of the ghost country of rural Massachusetts. Like Troy, this region contains evidence of successive sackings: in the pine and hardwood forests, which now comprise two-thirds of the state, many cellar holes and overgrown stone walls that farmers left behind when they went west; riverside textile mills, still the largest buildings in many little towns, but their windows broken now, their machinery crumbling to rust and the business gone to Asia and down south. However, on many of the roads that lead back behind the highway's scenery stand not woods and relics, but brand-new neighborhoods, apartment houses, and shopping centers. The roads around them fill up with cars before nine and after five. They are going to and from commercial buildings that wear on their doors and walls descriptions of new enterprise. Digital Equipment, Data General --there on the edge of the woods, those names seemed like prophecies to me, before I realized that the new order they implied had arrived already.

A few miles north of the junction of Route 495 and the Massachusetts Turnpike, off an access road, sits a two-story brick building, surrounded byparking lots. A sign warns against leaving a car there without authority. The building itself looks like a fort. It has narrow windows, an American flag on a pole out front, a dish antenna on a latticed tower. Mounted on several corners of the roofs, and slowly turning, are little TV cameras.

This is Building 14A/B --14B was fastened seamlessly to 14A. Some employees call the place "Webo," but most refer to it as "Westborough," after the name of the town inside whose borders the building happens to exist. "Westborough" is worldwide headquarters of the Data General Corporation. Driving up to the building one day with one of the company's public relations men, I asked, "Who was the architect?"

"We didn't have one!" cried the beaming press agent.

Company engineers helped to design Westborough, and they made it functional and cheap. One contractor who did some work for Data General was quoted in Fortune as saying, "What they call tough auditing, we call thievery." However they accomplished it, Westborough cost only about nineteen dollars a square foot at a time when the average commercial building in Massachusetts was going for something like thirty-four dollars a foot. But looks do matter here. The company designed Westborough not just for the sake of thriftiness, but also to make plain to investors and financial analysts that Data General really is a thrifty outfit. "There's no reason in our business to have an ostentatious display," a company analyst for investor relations explained. "In fact, it's detrimental."

The TV cameras on the roofs, the first defense against unscrupulous competitors and other sorts of spies and thieves, must comfort those who have a stake in what goes on inside. As for me, I imagined that somewhere in the building men in uniforms were watching me arrive, and I felt discouraged from walking on the grass.

The only door that opens for outsiders leads to the front lobby. A receptionist asks you to sign a logbook, which inquires if you are an American citizen, wants your license plate number, and so on. Still you cannot pass the desk and enter the hallways beyond --not until the employee you want to see comes out and gives you escort. When I inquired, the cheerful young receptionist said that once in a great while some outsider would try to break the rules and try to slip inside.

The lobby could belong to a motor inn. It has orange carpeting and some chairs and a sofa upholstered in vinyl, on which salesmen and would-be employees languish, awaiting appointments. Now and then, a visitor will stand and gaze into a plastic case. It contains the bare bones of a story that will feed the dreams of any ambitious businessman. THE FIRST NOVA, reads a legend on the case. Inside sits a small computer, about the size of a suitcase, with a cathode-ray tube -- a thing like a television screen -- beside it. A swatch of prose on the back wall, inside the case, explains that this was the first computer that Data General ever sold. But the animal in there isn't stuffed; the computer is functioning, lights on it softly blinking as it produces on the screen beside it a series of graphs -- ten years' worth of annual reports, a precis of Data General Corporation's financial history.

Left to their own devices, the engineers who worked in the basement of Building 14A/B could surely have produced a flashier display, but a visitor from Wall Street who had never paid attention to this company before might have felt faint before the thing. The TV screen was blue. The graphs, etched in white, appeared in rotating sequence, and each one bore a name. "Cumulative Computers Shipped Since Our Founding" started with 100 in 1969 and went right up to 70,700 in 1979. The image vanished. "Net Sales" appeared, to show that revenues had ascended without a hitch from nothing in 1968 to $507.5 million in 1979. That graph went away and in its place came one describing profit margins. These hardly varied. The profits just rolled in, year after year, along a nearly straight line, at about 20 percent (before taxes) of those burgeoning net sales.

Table of Contents


Introduction to the Modern Library Edition
Prologue A: Good Man in a Storm
Chapter 1: How to Make a Lot of Money
Chapter 2: The Wars
Chapter 3: Building a Team
Chapter 4: Wallach's Golden Moment
Chapter 5: Midnight Programmer
Chapter 6: Flying Upside Down
Chapter 7: La Machine
Chapter 8: The Wonderful Micromachines
Chapter 9: A Workshop
Chapter 10: The Case of the Missing NAND Gate
Chapter 11: Shorter Than a Season
Chapter 12: Pinball
Chapter 13: Going to the Fair
Chapter 14: The Last Crunch
Chapter 15: Canards
Chapter 16: Dinosaurs
Epilogue
Acknowledgments

Customer Reviews

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Sort by: Showing all of 3 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted March 24, 2002

    A Must Read!!

    I came away very satisfied. A computer is separated into 6 basic levels. Mr. Kidder went through each of these levels without loosing me, as the reader. If you have any interest in how a computer is developed from and idea to something physical, you must get this book. It should be a required reading for all computer majors.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted May 18, 2000

    Excellant All-Round Technology Book!

    One of the best general technology book around. Reads like a novel. If you are interested in the human aspects of computer development, this is the book for you.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 27, 2008

    No text was provided for this review.

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