The Soul of a New Machine
by Tracy Kidder
reviewed by Allen Stenger

This is a history of what it takes to design and build a new computer. Tracy Kidder spent eight months in a basement in Westborough, Massachusetts watching the process and lived to tell us about it, and he tells it very well.

The minicomputer company Data General had gotten behind the curve in the late 1970s, and was in danger of being flattened by Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX series. Data General assembled an "official" team to design their answer to VAX, and an "insurance" team that was to devise a more modest answer, to be used only if the main team failed. The main team did fail, and this book is the story of the insurance team.

The thing that most comes out in the story is the constant struggle against obstacles: the technical challenges themselves, an impossible schedule, lack of resources, and (benign?) neglect from the company's top management. Kidder likens it to a "frontiersman's travails ... [with] wolves, hostile Indians, and busted wagon wheels" replaced by their modern-day computer engineering equivalents. One thing the team did not lack was confidence. The leaders had deliberately hired the smartest new graduates ("kids") they could find, inspired by the example of legendary computer designer Seymour Cray. In addition to being cheaper to hire, kids do not know what is impossible, and in fact none of the kids seemed to be daunted by their task. It was challenging, yes; wearying, yes; impossible, no. The team leaders were much less confident: "Maybe you couldn't build a major CPU with kids. It was awfully risky. It was a compelling idea." But they kept their doubts to themselves, and the kids were left alone in their basement.

The book is not primarily a technical book, but a management book and a human story, and has held up well in the thirty years since its publication. Most of the technology described in the book, although brand-new at the time, has become obsolete since then. Engineering management and the way leading-edge projects are tackled has not changed much over the past thirty years, and because the book focuses on those aspects, it has aged well.

Kidder is an excellent journalist, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award for General Nonfiction for this book. He tells compelling stories. If you like this book, you will probably like his next books "House" and "Among Schoolchildren", both in our library. "House" is somewhat similar but low-tech and low-pressure, describing the design and building of a custom home. "Among Schoolchildren" is a very different book, but has the same meticulous research and detail of his other books. He spent a year in a fifth-grade classroom watching the struggles of the teacher, and the book brings out how hard education really is (a point usually overlooked by education reformers).