The Soul of a New Machine

You are about to enter an exotic workplace where daylight never shines, and each second of time has 1,000,000,000 (one billion!) parts. It is the computer laboratory of a fascinating firm whose brilliant engineers sometimes come to work hours early just to be there first, while others burn out and go home in the middle of the day, unable to cope anymore with the wicked pace and pressure. Brazenly competitive is probably the kindest thing their detractors have called them, because there is no denying that this has been one of the most controversial and profitable computer companies in American business — risen from nothing to the ranks of the Fortune 500 in ten tumultuous years. Welcome to the Data General Corporation of Westborough, Massachusetts. This is The Soul of a New Machine.

Everything you are about to read actually happened. No names have been changed. Nothing controversial has been left out. In 1979 Tracy Kidder went underground into the closely guarded research basement of Data General to observe a crack team of computer wizards about to embark on a crash program to design and build a fast new computer: the Eagle Project. The "Hardy Boys" and the "Microkids" they called themselves, a bunch of competitive youngsters, most right out of engineering school, about to put together a "32-bit supermini" more powerful and more complicated than any one of them could individually understand, more advanced than anything yet on the market. A lot of people — inside the company and out — were bettering that they couldn't do it. One man — their secretive and solitary boss, Tom West — was betting everything that they could.

For weeks and months Kidder watched as they pushed themselves to their physical and intellectual limits and beyond — twelve-hour days, twenty-hour days, all-night shifts, weekends — in an effort to "maximize the win" by building their machine in record time: one year. "Flying upside down" West called it — an essential tactic when quick success could mean a larger share of the multimillion-dollar market and failure could mean serious damage to their careers, and perhaps to the steadily rising fortunate of Data General as well.

Tracy Kidder displays a remarkable mastery of technical detail that makes his entire story as exciting for the layman who knows little about computers as for the technician who works with them every day. He dramatizes the high tension surrounding the new machine's birth, re-creates the strategies and catastrophes of expertly trained players who are inventing new ways of working together and motivating each other, and reveals what the incredible, unrelenting pressure they live under does to them as people. As suspenseful as a good thriller, The Soul of a New Machine is a unique portrait of life and work behind the closed doors of the American high technology corporation.