Name: The Soul of a New Machine
Rating: 4 (14 reviews)
Author: Tracy Kidder

What’s in it for me:

In the late 1970s, there was a lot of money to be made in the minicomputer industry.

The author, Tracy Kidder got the chance to follow a team of engineers as they attempted to build a next-generation computer, even when the very company they worked for was reluctant to even let them try.

Soul of a New Machine explains how the vice president in charge of the team, Tom West, managed to motivate them to work nights and weekends for no extra pay, all because they felt they “wanted to get the machine out of the door.” The book chronicles the dawn of the high tech industry, when engineers felt that the thrill of working on the new generation of machines was the highest motivation possible.

It also explains the intricacies of designing and debugging such a machine, where you have to control the flow of electric current through thousands of chips in timeframes of a couple of hundred- billionths of a second, so that the machine performs tasks consistently without fault or error.

Data General was a fast-growing, no-frills computer company under pressure to design a new kind of minicomputer.

In the late 1970s, a few so-called “minicomputer” companies were in fierce competition with one another. (Back then, “minicomputer” meant a device costing under $25,000, that could just aboutfit into an elevator.) The biggest player was a company called DEC, with a circa 85% share of the market.

One company in particular, based in Westborough, Massachusetts, was notorious for its brutally competitive and stingy ways. That company was Data General. It had been founded about ten years earlier by the current president Ed De Castro, who had jumped ship from competitor DEC.

From the outset, Data General was focused strictly on profits, with little ostentation: even their headquarters was a bleak, concrete fort.

The company’s practices were infamous in the industry; even competitors warned customers about these dangerous newcomers, which of course only generated more buzz for the company. There was even a rumor that Data General had torched a competitor’s factory.

But Data General did indeed make money, generating 20% profits, year after year, until its revenue eventually grew to a whopping $508 million and the company found itself in 500th place on the Fortune 500.

It was around this time that competitors such as DEC were coming out with a new kind of computer – the “supermini” – and everyone wanted one. DEC’s new VAX 11/780 machine was considered a breakthrough in this burgeoning industry, and Data General – learning that the market was set to be worth several billion dollars in just a few years – decided it needed to build an “answer” to the VAX.

To this end, Tom West, an engineering Vice President at Data General, bought and took apart the VAX machine. After examining it closely, he decided Data General could do better.

Two separate teams began work on a competitor to the VAX: one flush with resources, the other unofficial and on the cheap.

To pursue, among other things, a contender for the VAX, Data General built a new research and development center in North Carolina.

The North Carolina (NC) department had a huge team, lots of resources and it was supposed to be the primary gamble for the new supermini: A team of 50-people moved to NC to work on the supermini project, also known as the Fountainhead Project (FHP), luring away many of the best and most experienced engineers from Westborough.

The Eagle team was motivated by fear, pressure and the possibility of “playing again.”

The team in Westborough worked ungodly hours and under tremendous pressure to produce quality work while getting the machine to market as quickly as possible. But they weren’t compensated for overtime, and though in some cases the possibility of stock options was implied, most said they were not doing it for the money.

Sohow did West motivate them?

The young graduates formed two teams – the Hardy Boys and the Micro Kids – which built the “soul” of the new machine.

Though Tom West was in charge of the Eagle project, most of the work was done by two teams composed of the young graduate hires.

The Hardy Boys were in charge of designing the actual hardware – the circuitry of the machine. This was a crucial role, because computers consisted of various parts which had to communicate with each other seamlessly so that the computer could perform the tasks demanded of it.

Key ideas in The Soul of a New Machine

What is The Soul of a New Machine about?

The Soul of a New Machine (1981) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about one team at the computer company Data General who was determined to put its company back on the map by producing a new superminicomputer. With very few resources and under immense pressure, the team pulls together to produce a completely new kind of computer.