The Soul of A New Machine

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

This book gives a rare and amazing insight into how a company creates a new product and all the hardships to bring it to market. Further it’s insights into team dynamics, leadership and project structure is simply amazing. The events covered in this book are now 40 years in the past but still today one can pickup some gold. But above all it’s just a fun and amazing look into the early days of computing. In the days of VAX and data general and many other companies that are no longer around. Highly recommended.

This book is a wonderful history for any EE out there. But more so it’s a great inspiration for anyone who hates the “Bros” the mindless drones who spread like cancer through most companies running them into the ground. This book covers a strategy that can be used to head off such cancer, if only for a little while.

This book is a fascinating recount of Data General's effort to bring a new computer to the market. Through the stories we re-live moments of "drama, comedy, and excitement" as an engineering team works day and night in the goal of developing a computer - project code "Eagle". The author focuses on the natural tension that exists between the engineers and their management. Particularly that of a focus on product vs. the market and the race to develop the next computer. Within this book are numerous lessons on technical leadership, management and organizational dynamics. The lead on the effort (Tom) is a strong believer in grass-root effort and had the ability to build a team, rally them toward a common cause and lead them to success. As mentioned on the cover: "What has changed little, however, is computer culture: the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the mystique of programmers, the entrepreneurial bravado that has caused so many start-up companies to win big (or crash and burn), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations. By tracing computer culture to its roots, by exploring the "soul" of the "machine" that has revolutionized the world, Kidder succeeds as no other writer has done in capturing the essential of the computer age." A fun classic read with numerous applicable lessons! Below are two excerpts that I found particularly relevant: 1- "Software compatibility is a marvelous thing. That was the essential lesson West took away from his long talks with his friend in Marketing. You didn't want to make a machine that wasn't compatible, not if you could avoid it. Old customers would feel that since they'd need to buy and create all new software anyways, they might as well look at what other companies had to offer; they'd be likely to undertake the dreaded "market survey"." 2- "Adopting a remote, managerial point of view, you could say that the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team inside a company an entrepreneurial spirit, which was channeled in the right direction by constraints sent down from the tip. But it seems more accurate to say that a group of engineers got excited about building a computer. Whether it arose by corporate bungling or by design, the opportunity had to be grasped. In this sense, the initiative belonged entirely to West and the members of his team. What's more, they did the work, both with uncommon spirit and for reasons that, in a most frankly commercial setting, seemed remarkably pure."

I just finished rereading this book and it told it the way it was. As a former CIO, I understand the management style and the value of having independent and dedicated staff that are involved in making a difference. I had one employee tell me he thought our company should be offering divorce benefits to offset the lawyer fees. To think this book is about minicomputers is a mistake – it is about how a group of dedicated young people make major changes inside a large corporation even with large government programs. My wife worked on Apollo and some defense systems in the 1960s and the same dedication to a cause and the willingness to take major risks were in place. Many start ups also today have the same work ethic but the bureaucrats are winning both at the national level and in our corporations whose interest now is on government not the consumer or the goal., For example the Chinese just landed a very sophisticated rover on the moon and we can't even get a web site to work. This is a great book, one of the best on a management style that returns real results. It is as valid today, probably even more so today, than it was in the 1980s.

At this time of the year, I select a few books about diverse subjects and re-read them with the hope that new insights will occur that I missed previously. That is certainly true of this book (the second edition published in 1997 when I first read it) and James Gleick's Isaac Newton (2003). Dozens of other reviewers have already shared their reasons for thinking so highly of Tracy Kidder's account of Data General's efforts to create a new 32-bit superminicomputer. Here are three of mine. First, I am grateful for being able to learn so much about Joseph Thomas "Tom" West III (1939-2011) and his contributions to the development of "the new machine." He led a project team (code-named "Eagle") that competed with another team (code-named "Fountainhead") within the Data General organization. Most of the drama in Kidder's narrative is created by the in-house competition to design a next-generation computer that could not only compete with but in fact win out in direct competition with a new 32-bit minicomputer brought to market by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). At least initially, West's group was generally viewed as a back-up {"second string") project team. However, over time.... Also, Kidder brilliantly develops a tension between two quite opposite mindsets. One is expressed by West: "Not everything worth doing is worth doing well" and "If you can do a quick-and-dirty job and it works, do it." Predictably, the engineers strongly disagreed and objected strenuously to being rushed to produce what they were certain would be an inferior product. They refused to cut corners, accept compromises, etc. West understood their concerns and in a perfect world would have accommodated them. However, he remained determined to not only beat DEC to market but also to retain dominance of that market thereafter. Finally, Kidder provides his readers with still another opportunity to examine the dynamics of teamwork that is sustained under severe pressure from all manner of sources both within and beyond the given enterprise. As I proceeded through the book, I was again reminded of Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman's classic study of several great teams, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration. Those groups include the Disney animators who created Dumbo, Snow White, and Pinocchio as well as those involved with the Manhattan Project and Lockheed's "Skunk Works." These and other teams were led by determined, at times driven leaders and were comprised of members who were quite different in terms of their talent, experience, and temperament. Those who led them were not "herding cats," a term widely attributed; indeed, they were leading an entire menagerie. No brief commentary such as mine could possibly do full justice to the scope and depth of coverage that Tracy Kidder gives to one of several pivotal chapters in the history of computer technology. I am grateful for what I learned this time around that I had missed previously. I intend to re-read it again and meanwhile highly recommend the book to those who share my keen interest in the humanity on which the "soul" of any breakthrough technology depends. That was certainly true 35 years ago and it is even more true today.

Great story that gives a layman point of view on engineering a functional 32 bit computer in the turbulent computer industry of the late 70s. Gives an interesting look at the engineers back stories. Book can feel frustrating and slow moving at times, but this is also how it feels when creating something. I could feel the stress, monotony and endless hours poured into something. Shows the dangers of becoming an engineer and the pressure people feel to work insane hours to accomplish a goal that may never see the light of day. At the end of this book I found myself split on two separate opinions: 1. The ability for a team to come together and against all expectations to produce something faster then anyone expected. This was an amazing feat. 2. Given the right circumstances, a strong leader, fresh college graduates, managers willing to push, and a lofty high goal, a team and it's members can be pushed to work 80 to 100 hours a week for years to achieve said lofty goal for a company that only pays them for 40 hours a week. It's shows the ability to create/exploit cult like behavior to create something new. I have no doubt that a similar story could be made for countless products. We hear stories of the first Macintosh and iPhone, and how much work and sacrifice was put into these products. We praise the iPhone and Mac as being revolutionary products, but what if in the end it was just a normal product. This is the story of that machine.

The Soul of a New Machine is the classic about the common culture of building a new computer (or building new software). It tells the story of Data General creating the Eagle computer (the MV/8000) and the death march project creating the project. The main character in the book is Tom West who is the manager of the Eagle development group. His initial role is to keep the group out of the organizational radar and not let the organizational politics influence the group that designs the new computer. However, later he is more involved my making sure that all pieces fit together. The book introduces a couple of main characters in the book every chapter, tying them together by some events. This is done in a chronological order. Early on the focus is more on the architect of the system (Wallach) were later it switches to the debuggers who make long hours in the lab to find the last bugs in the computer. The book describes wonderfully how the engineers give up their whole life to the machine for nearly nothing in return and how little they are appreciated within the organization. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the Soul of the Machine and its definitively worth reading, especially if you are interested in history of computers or are involved with modern software development. Unfortunately, much of the culture in many companies hasn't changed much from the death march described in the Soul of the Machine.

I worked at Data General in the years after this was written before the company went the way of all the super minicomputer companies. This book deservedly won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction. Even for those not into computers, it is immensely readable -- reading like a high-tech adventure story. The author does not get lost in high-tech language -- explaining along the way what certain terms mean so even the lay reader can follow and find the story enjoyable and fascinating. It gives a great look into the culture of a company that epitomized that era -- and, I dare say, the culture of many current firms as well.

read this book many times, needed a new copy one of the best books ever, fascinating read for any techie who would like to check out the human side of big development projects, and also a great read on the historical tech business when the race to 32 bit minicomputers was on. although plenty of tech explanations are included in a very effective and engrossing manner, the people side really makes the book!

Other than the annoying peppering of "gonna" and the like throughout, it's a fantastic read with a surprising level of technical detail. If you work in the EE biz you'll recognize many of the personality types (and probably have similar love/loathe reactions to them). Amazing how the basic work and approaches to it remain substantially the same to this day. Though processors have thankfully become more RISC-like and therefore likely less micro-coded. Back then memory was expensive and small, so it made sense for processor instruction sets to be more kitchen sink-like.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

Well written, it puts you in the room with the team as they build a new and improved computer in the early days of computing. It's a good history written as if it were a novel with a cast of characters who happen to be real. Recommended for anyone interested in the back room human experience of computer engineers.

This books is a story of building a computer, from start to finish, told in the form of an epic journey. It goes in depth on the people involved, strategy used, the company politics and how they all integrated into and affected the project. Being in a small software organization for the last 4 years and having experience a tripling in size and about the same in revenue, it was very easy for me to find parallels to my company's growth, the people and the experiences that were at Data General when the computer was built. Here are some of the (summed up briefly) that I found: 1. Speech Period (pep ralley) 2. Leader becoming more and more distant 3. Need to be doing something interesting 4. Mushroom Theory of Management (put them in the dark, feed them s*$# and watch them grow). 5. Everyone burns out 6. All of the sudden, its just a job 7. The gunslinger 8. Management has changed and its no longer the same place ... and many others I think that anyone reading the book curious of parallels in businesses (regardless of what they do), would find this book a good source of info.

I first read Tracy Kidder's book "The Soul of a New Machine" in the early 1980s, shortly after its publication in 1981. At the time I was intrigued and interested in the process and detail of engineering required to bring a new computer to market; and I was fascinated by the leadership/management skills employed by the key character to "motivate" the team. I thought it was a great read. That was nearly thirty years ago. Recently, I mentioned this book in a conversation with a colleague and subsequently decided to read it again. I hoped it would be as good as I thought it was the first time, but I was skeptical. Technology has changed a lot; and both the MV/8000 and Data General Corporation are now long gone. Would "The Soul of a New Machine" still be as gripping a story as it was originally? The answer, in a word, is YES! In rereading the book in 2011, I was struck by the diversity of the team engaged in this effort, the various work methods and styles that had to come together for success. Kidder introduces the reader to a wonderful cast of characters who worked incredible hours and faced enormous time pressures under great stress for months and months to birth a new computer. It may sound simple, but it wasn't. "The Soul of a New Machine" is a gripping, circuitous, wonderful tale of a dream and the team that brought it to life.

Being a kid from early 80's who grew up with Commodore 64, this story about how a group of computer enthusiasts is like a flash back to the days when you learned assembler, opened the computer to do some tweaks, learned the insides of it and made your early reach out to the world with 'modems'. The book is very eye opening and also pictures the era where everything was possible and computers were still far from being consumerized . I read this book tens of times during the years loaning it from the library and it took years to find it hard covered. And later on also as ebook. For me this book is a wonderful picture taken from the 80's when PCs were much more exciting than they are now.

Unfortunately the book focused more on manipulative motivation and less on MBO (Management By Objectives) when it described the methods used to get 60+ hours of work for 40 hours pay. It was right on target when it described the obsession with solving problems and how it was used to meet the company's goals in the market. The challenge of supervising a group of uniquely talented engineering types was described as the author perceived it from stories.

I've bought this book several times over four decades and I keep going back to it. I can't say that about many books so I consider this one of my top-ten.

Kidder does a wonderful job of expressing the trials and tribulations that a computer engineer experiences when on the most ideal of projects, designing and building a new computer from the ground up. Even 29 years after the Data General Eagle first took flight the emotions exhibited by those who built it can be observed in countless modern computer projects both hardware and software. After finishing this book I was struck with that feeling you get of saying a final goodbye to an old friend. As many other reviewers have stated this book should be required reading for any aspiring engineer as it does a great job of showing what separates the proverbial men from the boys in the computing industry.

Page turning nonfiction about the development of one of the first computers, and the work environment that made it possible. Extremely well-written. If you don't have an interest in computers, you'll probably be bored by some of the technical descriptions, but you can get a lot out of the book and learn a lot about management styles even if you skim or skip those parts. It gave me a lot of insight into the way that start up companies are able to overwork their employees. Bitter about working long hours? You'll probably find this interesting, insightful, and therapeutic.

Since I was working in the computer industry during part of this time, the book was very interesting to read and understand what happened at that time. Lots of fond memories of those systems!

Now a little dated, as it describes a 1970s-80s mini computer skunk works project, but shows that the same work till you drop ethos has long existed, much before current PCs and their coders were born. Lots of parallels, but the extreme VC money aspect today has taken over.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

Classic description of the development of a computer. Although the technology is far behind the present, the story remains fascinating.

This is the must read for engineering management professionals: the story of how to enable the creative environment and evolve the approach.

Excellent book detailing the development of a newer, better computer,and the people involved. Kidder always manages to get deeply into the minds and hearts of the people he writes about, and the many historical and cultural points that surround his stories.Keep in mind this was written almost 35 years ago, ancient history in the tech world. His other books are worth searching for.

Very engrossing narrative about the engineering of a brand new minicomputer by a team of highly motivated and skilled individuals.

A good book on one aspect of IT history. I had it back in the day, and enjoyed it. Lost in in one of several moves over the years. Glad to find it available again. It had a part in my getting into the IT profession.

I enjoyed the book. I'm an electrical engineer with a lot of software development experience, so I was not overwhelmed with the technical level of the book. Actually, I was hoping for more detail, especially the microcode decoder section, but the book was written for the non-technical audience, so I'm sure any more technical detail and their eyes would glaze over. I could have been part of that group. I was part of the graduating class from college the year that Data General was hiring engineers to build the computer, but I know I never saw any job ads for Data General. I'm not sure I would have wanted to work so many hours in a row, anyway. I've given it to my wife to read so she might understand a little better about engineers and our passion for the fields we are in. Then, it goes to my in-laws for the same reason.

I first read this book when it came out - while I was in college. It's interesting to re-read it 30 years later with the perspective of what became of the Eclipse MV8000, Data General, Digital Equipment, and the other non-human Dramatis Personae. As far as the people - who knows: it's easier to follow the history of an industry than the people who comprise it. But it's the people that Kidder wisely focuses upon. What comes through is the passion that a group of people have for their work - the long hours, the camaraderie, and the joy of creation. I confess - as an engineer it tweaks me when artists dismiss the profession. Engineering is the act of creation just as much as art is - with one added requirement: the creation must be useful. The technology in the book is archaic, but the process is the same today in Silicon Valley as then in Westboro, Mass. In fact, it's the requirement for utility that consigns most engineering creation to the scrap heap in short order - that's how it's supposed to be. It's still a pleasure to do the work, and that is evident in this book. I think that reading this book helps explain something: I've never met an engineer unhappy about his or her career choice - try finding an attorney that skips to work. Is it hard to keep sharp at the cutting edge? Absolutely - the MV8000 was a market failure, Data General went under in the 1992 recession, and mighty Digital (once the largest private employer in Massachusetts and New Hampshire) was bought in a fire sale by Compaq for access to the Alpha CPU architecture - which went unused and was scrapped when Compaq was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. The same HP that laid the cornerstone for Silicon Valley and now makes money selling over-priced printer cartridges. You drive in the fast lane, you get in a wreck or two. But it is FUN to drive in the fast lane!

For IT professionals looking to understand more about how projects were run in the 70s (to compare that with how projects are run today), this book is great. A fine read. The key thing here is that although the technology has changed since the 70s, the management and team structures depicted in _The Soul of a New Machine_ could be in place today. For better or worse. This book should be read by any IT professional who is looking to be part of a technical product team. If only to better understand technical team dynamics.

If you are an old computer geek, as am I, having started my programming career in the early 70s with CDC 6000 series mainframes and PDP-11 minicomputers, you'll love the history behind the technology and programming techniques you used over the years. -

This is a great book about the birth of a new computer. This book was a quick read and has good lessons for product design engineers and integration engineers. Should be on the list of books that you give to entry level engineers in your organization. American Steel by Richard Preston would be another that I would suggest. Both show the effort required to develop a product.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

One of the author's best if not first book with an insider's view from within a team or effort covering the day-to-day grind and challenges of building Data General's first 32 bit mini computer. Easy to read and not technical it covers the members of the hardware team as both engineers and people. Offers an inside view the complexity of the industry, team work and engineering.

The plot is interesting especially once you figure out the complex network of characters and their roles. The Soul of A New Machine reveals the inner workings and thought processes that are involved in building a pioneering machine that has such an effect on society. Kidder does a neat job in documenting the journey of an amateur company sweating to compete for a place in the market against their giant technological counterparts such as IBM while illustrating key lessons about technology itself.

Really good read. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and learning what tech companies were like. A must for anybody that is interested or works in the field.

I first read this book not long after it was published. In my recollections of it over the years since then, I believed Kidder much more vividly had described the way the mind works of someone who creates computers from the ground up. I have told many people, to whom I have enthusiastically recommended this book, of their strange, esoteric, unfathomable thought processes. Reading it again, I have no idea where I got that impression. I attended college at a school known in large part for engineering, roomed for two years with an engineering student, and knew many others quite well. I found them to be very much as Kidder describes them, but I have not known any of them to have unfathomable minds, only somewhat odd and often narrowly focused minds. There is not a thing wrong with this book, but on second reading it nevertheless leaves me vaguely unsatisfied, as though since I first read it and now someone excised a lot of it. If I could have given it three and a half stars I would have, because it is clearly better than three stars. Probably it's a four or even a five -- but it just doesn't feel like that to me. I suppose I'll have to re-read House now to see how that compares to my first read of 30 or so years ago.

A classic. Insight (written by a non-technologist) into the workaholic nature of salaried technologists and Silicon Valley engineers (though the activity was far away from there and predated the emergence of the largely-now-gone Silicon Valley) before money was the driving factor: just the challenge of solving a problem being the motivational force.

Great story of how the digital computer era came of age. Must read for any computer scientist or computer engineer or just tech buffs in general. Great story but also extremely well written.

“Soul of a New Machine” covers a hardware team’s development of a minicomputer back in the late 1970’s. I chose this book because I was part of a software team working on a project (also in the late 1970’s) and was curious as to how their experiences compared to my own. The book talks about the long hours, the “keep them in the dark” management philosophy, the key people, the complexities (and the difficulties that result) – but didn’t convey (to me) the PASSION that the engineers bring to the project. I.e., the “highs”, the “lows”, the team comradery, the idea of creating something out of nothing. One chapter was devoted to isolating and fixing a design “bug”. That’s a hard thing to make interesting. I’ve done my share of debugging. To the debugger, many bugs, once found and understood, are quite interesting (some even result in lessons you retain for a lifetime), But any specific debugging is rarely interesting to others as they were simply not a part of that “Eureka” moment. One book that did convey the passion and excitement of software development was “Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture”. I recommend that book instead.

While the details and scope are different today the essence is still the same. If you want a look into this world this book still provides a great view.

How can a book about such a geeky subject be so gripping? I think I know. The book is about the development of new technology, yes, but more than that this is the narrative of teamwork. Every so often, a team of people with a shared goal come together and create greatness. This book is a look into that fascinating process and the culture that encouraged it. I couldn't put this down until the last page was turned -- it is just fantastic.

Great story, and well written. If the subject of how early computers were designed, I'd say this is the book to read. It gets into the personalities that were important in the building of the computer, lots and lots of technical details, and keeps the story running all the way through the process. Great book

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

Great read for anyone interested in the history of technology, and the teams of people behind it.

The Soul of A New Machine is a fascinating look at how a new computer was designed in the late 1970s. It is especially interesting if you work in today's technology industry: you get to see both how similar and how different things are done today. It's also very well written, with excellent pacing. I have been recommending it recently to my close friends, and so recommend it to you as well. And, once you finish reading it, read the Wired piece written about the people in the book 20 years later.

This book covers the development of a new computer in an era far different from the modern day. As such, it's a fascinating look at how things were done decades ago when computers were a lot less powerful, a lot larger, and had to be hand-assembled with few off-the-shelf components.

Though the technology the story is about has become dated, the story itself hasn't; the book is about the building of a computer, yes, but then it is about Kidder's own mind coming to grips with the technology involved, and then more about the people who were doing the actual building Kidder's book is engaging and terrifically written. It is a landmark work of modern non-fiction writing, and fully deserves its Pulitzer.

A page turner. Reads like a novel. Great example of the early days of computer design and marketing

It could use some editing to shorten about a half-dozen points at which it "drags." Of course, one doesn't know how much longer the drags will last, so I read it all. In between, it was interesting, but even without the "drags" it would only increase to a four-star, at best.

This book covers the creation of the Data General MV/8000 computer. I worked on one of these when I was first starting out as a programmer so the book resonates with me on a personal level. With our without that, it is a fascinating read showing not just the technical hurdles involved but also the political and personal ones that must be dealt with to get something of this magnitude from concept to reality. Geeks will love the descriptions of logic unit designs and debugging sessions, while others can appreciate the team struggling with company politics and having to work under incredibly stressful conditions to bring their dream to life The story is 35 years old now so parts of it may sound quaint to someone up on the latest technology, but it takes nothing away from this being a great story of a group of people pursuing the state of the art and reaching it despite all of the obstacles put in their way. The author includes profiles of some of the team members giving the story a more human feel as well.

Great story about hubris and the effort that it takes to pull it off. I've often thought that startups and making new things requires arrogance and ignorance and this proves it. If you knew how hard it was going to be when you started, you never would have!

Tells the tale of a bunch of developers who invested body and soul to the creation of Data General's new machine only to find out that the world views the finished product merely as a commodity with a price tag. Indeed, the soul of the new machine got lost in transit from the lab to the marketing department. All credit to the author for coming up with a treatise understandable both to the computer engineer as well as the man on the street.

I re-read this book on the anniversary of it's publication I believe that was 30 years ago. It Stood up very well and helps us understand how our modern digital world came about. Read this with Walter Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs and His other book on the history of the computers.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

One of the best books written. This must be at least my fourth copy. I keep telling people how good it is and loaning it out and it doesn't come back. Finally bought the digital copy so I will always be able to go back and read it.

This is an old book but its truth are timeless. Great read for young and old alike. It concerns the computer industry but that's not the lessons it teaches.

If you've ever been on a hardware/software development team, you'll recognize yourself and all of your colleagues in this extraordinary book. Although it documents a project in the 1978 to 1980 timeframe, it could just as easily be today. A rare treat.

A review into the early tech world which has passed the test of time. A great gift fo those just entering the tech world as well as those who have helped shape it.

Having been a software guy, I never thought about the complexity of designing a computer. This is a fantastic story, both the engineering and the psychology. Great read.

This is a great book if you are interested in computer history. Read the entire book in just 4 days and I'm a slow reader.

Being in the same industry, the story really hits home. Good case study for many different industries, and is still relevant today.

Read this when it first came out, back when I was a programmer for 'CVS' in Sacramento. Re-reading it has brought back fond memories & the thrill of being at the forefront of new technology. Also, being a woman in a field full of men AND being respected was phenomenal!

Technology has evolved; nobody makes a CPU on seven circuit boards. But as an electrical engineer, I can clearly see the reflection on my own work. Kidder's portrait of CPU designers is remarkably accurate. It's good to stand back and see yourself in a different perspective. A group of young and under-funded engineers are more motivated because they have something to prove. Limited resources can actually make people more resourceful. A follow-up by Wired magazine is also interesting to read. [...] wired. com/wired/archive/8.12/soul_pr.html

Some scary similarities with the present for those of us in product development. A great flow that drags you into the project such that you want to keep reading to get it done. Good general read, not just tech heads, and some interesting take-homes for management style, system architecture and HW debugging practices.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

This is the classic. In this read you will learn how computers were designed in the old days and also how the people were managed to do it. I read this book many years ago and was one of the first books I re-bought when I got my Kindle.

I spent 15 years in the software industry in QA, a time period a little later than the time period Kidder investigated. I think his recounting of failures and successes in that fast moving world was spot on. The players were all to real and their challenges similar to those faced by others all across the industry. Great study.

Despite the decades since this was written, it is a fascinating page turner of a read. Unless you've done this kind of work, there's much to be learned. Kidder and John McPhee stand alone at the top of this genre.

Kidder got too involved in explaining the technology. Some parts were very dense and made one lose interest, but overall he focused on the people who drove the innovations which made it worth reading.

This book (or more accurately, the Reader's Digest of it) set me in the path to become an Electronics Engineer. I can not say anything more.

A story of how the world was changed by the microprocessor, and about engineers and their desire to create. Extremely revealing story on many different levels.

Early eighties building the next generation computer. Interesting human analysis and business insights. Don't give up when it gets bogged down.

this is a good book for understanding how the computer revolution actually came about

Fascinating both in terms of history of computing and as a lesson in team building under pressure. I also recommend listening to some of the discussions available on the NPR Science Friday web site--I read this based on its Science Friday book club summer 2015 selection.

Having been in the computer industry during the time this book was written makes it just that much more relevant. A great read !!

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

We got this book because so many people in the computer industry seem to have read it. It's quite interesting and a good read, but the story is getting fairly old now.

An excellent read, covers many topics and scenarios still strongly applicable in today's technical industry -- computers and beyond. The team dynamics are intriguing and the prose is well written.

Being in the computer industry at the time, I found the book interesting. But it frequently rambled on about uninteresting trivia.

Good story about engineers at work reveals insightful glance into the heart if how technology teams work under pressure evolve and then fade away as the next new thing forms

Rereading this classic was just as enjoyable as the first read. A great story well told. Highly recommended if you are in the trade.

See headline

I first read this book many years ago when I was working in a cutting edge computer start up. Seven start ups later, it still provides an accurate picture of that wild, exciting, demanding place called a start up.

Amazing insight into the environment of R&D during the development of a new computer system.

Great book, strongly recommended.

Good history of the development

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

A great price and fast delivery. Very pleased.

I found the book very insightful from both a business managerial and information age perspective. My understanding of how computers work is enhanced and the social complexities of an organization under pressure to deliver was well captured. Great read and not mired in geeky vocabulary. On to Mountains Beyond Mountains...

Wonderful read.

It's a heroic tale about creating the impossible, although far from as heroic it remembered me about my own debugging time.

Nicely written. A good, quick read. I'd recommend it for anyone interested in the history of the computer industry.

As an engineer, i loved this story. it shows the reality of how technology is created.

Great insightful book that looks in the personal side of the people who made the computers of the late 1970s to early 1980. Not too nerdy.

Very good and interesting book

While as a technical person I would've liked an even more in-depth discussion of the machine being built, it was still a fun tale of the early days of machine construction before everything was miniaturized onto one or a handful of chips.

Not great, but a good book worth considering. I found myself skipping pages at times when I got bored with the details but the story itself is very interesting.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book - really interesting to read something that is truly history at this point. To a kid these days, though, this would be totally dated!

Fascinating read about the earlier days of computer engineering

This is an excellent read, especially for those like me who got into the computer industry in the late 70's and early 80's. I would recommend it for any age "techie" today.

Just purchased for my son. This book changed my life as a budding computer architect / information system engineer when I read it ca. 1984.

I sent this in eBook form to a friend. The story did not end as I suspected it would (I thought a sentient AI was being created.), and I was a little disappointed. I give it four stars because I'm not into technical jargon, and therefore the writing was a bit dry. Still I enjoyed the book.

Yes exactly as remember

Having been involved in the business for a long time, it was interesting to see what went on to build the machines twenty years ago. This was a great narrative of what it was like for one particular generation of machine.

Sent to a colleague. Don't know, presume OK.

a very interesting book that's very easy to ready. An interesting look at both the people and the last gasp of the minicomputer.

This first edition (before the Pulitzer!) is in great condition and has made a wonderful gift for a tech-savvy friend.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

Soul of a New Machine is an in depth journey into the inner workings of the high tech world that preceded the personal computer era. Even though the technical jargon can be tedious, the human perspective keeps it interesting.

It's a story of a group of people working against a ridiculous deadline to bring to life an amazing machine. The computer depicted in the book may be dated, but the personal stories still ring true today.

It's a classic. Not much more can be said.

Arrived on time. My brother loved it!!!!

Liked the insight into a bygone era.

The writing style is not to my liking. It's written like a rough draft to a public speech. Entire paragraphs will be one long run on sentence, punctuated by only commas - unless a dash was added for effect.

A fascinating look into the early days of CPU development.

great

I Loved the book. Have done things similar myself, although not at the same level. Reminded me of the buzz.

One of those had to reads for a college class. Not my normal type of reading material, but at least I didn't fall asleep while reading it. And I got an A on the assignment. :)

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

I am in the industry and worked with a lot of these people. This book is now quite dated.

I pretty much agree with Librum's 2 star review "Slow Year for the Pulitzer Committee" I was in Data Processing in 1981 and can see how a story like this could have appealed to the masses. Nevertheless, it's poorly written, jumps around all over the place and really delivers nothing. Can't recommend this book for any reason.

Read it all the way through; extremely compelling and surprisingly not short on technical detail, especially for a mass-market book.

Was a gift.

Well told tale of a critical period in American history.

Excellent book exactly what I wanted.

A wonderful story and very well told.

engaging and exciting view behind the scene....

this is just a rating. what is there to review? I am not a critic. stop soliciting me for rating if you require me to write an essay here. I love it and that is it.

I haven't finished this book and I have no intention of doing so. I got lost with all the names of poorly developed characters and the jumping of the timeline. I thought it would be more about the building of a new computer.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

This product arrived in a timely manner and in excellent condition. I was very pleased. Gode Davis

Had to read it for a college class. Find a summary of this one, folks.

Interesting at first but the vocabulary gets too complicated with technical terms and about that time you have no idea what you are reading!

Twenty years ago I started a gig at Microsoft. It had already become a massive corporation and my badge number told me 126,000 people had been hired before me. However, a battle seemed to rage between the management styles in this book and a greater corporatization. Over the last two decades, many of the decisions of that effort have been clinched by changes in the wider world - in the very nature of computing as we confronted the cloud. Wikipedia tells me that Data General never really recovered from its financial malaise. The PC revolution would have submarined their entire business model. Nearly all of the company names Kidder listed at the Computer Convention are gone. I am torn by the lesson. It appears that Data General bulked up its middle management and executive ranks at the expense of true leadership. That is a trend throughout our industry. Furthermore, the disconnected nature of Eagle development and the lack of performance from the North Carolina team showed that DG lacked any real control. For all the interesting development in the Eagle story, it sounds like a derivative machine competing with a system that had been released for two years when it dropped. I read a review that discussed some of the tactics here as being key to a first mover strategy, but that rings false when one considers that DG nearly missed the market with this machine. The bitter feelings at the end tell me that more “attaboys” probably could have been used in development. For all the money running through the industry, the lack of rewards for the team is unconscionable. In the end, the real lesson that shines through for the modern R&D manager is expressed in the final few chapters. As Kidder points out, industrial pressure has pushed the modern worker to monotonous tasks devoid of connection to the greater project. The “success” of Eagle was tied to the trust and initiative given to team members to own and drive meaty portions of development. Regardless of the intentions of upper management, this craftsmanship approach galvanized the team into achieving the improbable.

In The Soul of a New Machine, Kidder accompanies a team of young engineers tasked with building a new computer for Data General. The project is led by a curt manager with a methodology he calls mushroom management (keep them in a damp, dark place, and feed them shit) that would be impossible to instate in any sensible company these days. The project is of highest significance for the company, and everything is due yesterday, everyone working in a frantic pace to get the computer out the door before their rivals within the same company beat them to it. The pressure and the intense pace of work is tangible all through the book; especially in the chapters on the debugging of the computer, one gets a very solid sense of how difficult it should be to fix horribly complicated hardware bugs under such intense pressure. Soul of a New Machine hails from a time when the separate parts of a computer were actually built and tested by hand; a time when the CPU and the ALU resided on separate boards, a computer was debugged using oscilloscopes, and when finished, occupied three cabinets. For people of later generations who grew up with computers that came simply within a shiny black box, the story of these engineers provides a nice perspective of where the computer industry came from, and how the computer market could have developed in many other directions. The bigger question Kidder is after is what drives young, talented people to spend most of their waking hours on a new computer. The engineers he follows all have successful academic studies behind them, and are technically inclined, having broken and fixed electrical devices since their childhood. They all admit that money is not really the driving factor (they are not getting any money for the overtime they work). What these young people are driven by is the responsibility they are trusted with (doing the complete design for a fundamental part of a new computer) which they wouldn't get in other, more established companies, the team spirit the stressful situation leads to, and the feeling of belonging up there with the major figures of the computer revolution. As the Pulitzer prize would lead one to expect, Kidder does a great job of depicting the daily life of the Data General engineers. Especially interesting are how the teams create coping mechanisms to make it through the grueling schedule, and the lore and humor that surrounds the people and artifacts (My favorite: "An oscilloscope is what cavemen used to debug fire"). Unfortunately, the text frequently feels cold, only tracing the surface of the figures, maybe due to a voluntary journalistic distance. Some pages read like a software manual, precise and professional, but lacking the human depth and warmth. With a little less distance, it might have been possible to get closer to the real reasons people loose themselves in complicated technical projects.

I picked up a Modern Library hardcover at a used book store and thought from the dust jacket this might be interesting, plus it had won pantloads of awards so figured it must be pretty accessible. You can read from other reviews a fine synopsis of the plot, my contribution to the reviews would be to say that this book will be a tough slog to get through if you don't have a background in computers or engineering. There's a bit on team management and on business management, but there are long and painful stretches describing hardware or software design challenges that frankly were beyond me. It's simply not written for the novice, and that's probably not it's intended audience. But it will serve as an interesting snapshot in time to those interested in the late 1970s/early 1980s boomtime in computer design.

I read this book when it came out in 1981. It literally changed my life seeing that I went into the business after I finished it. I’m retired now and enjoyed a great career, all the challenges and never-ending innovation. I highly recommend not only this wonderful book but also the AMC series “Halt and Catch Fire”. It covers the early 80s - the mid-90s and somehow nails the spirit and characters of those times. The final scenes of the series pan across a bookshelf on which is - you guessed it - “The Soul of A New Machine”. Perfect.

The contents of the book are out of date. It describes the computer technology in the 70s and 80s in great details. I found it boring and quit reading in the middle of the book.

I was working in academic computing when this book came out in 1981, and almost immediately after it was published it seemed everyone I knew was talking about it. Kidder had taken what to most was a fairly prosaic, even dull, topic- that of a group of engineers designing a new minicomputer- and presented it in a way that actually conveyed the excitement of their work to a non-technical audience. Topics as esoteric as 16 vs 32 bit architecture, address space, and threading were clearly explained in a way that even the most technologically naive reader could understand. Today, thirty six years later (as I write this), the once breathtaking performance of the Data General Eclipse MV/8000 has long been eclipsed and the cutting-edge features of that computer are now commonplace. But the human narrative of these engineers working together to create something brand new is no less fascinating today than it was in 1981. Those with a professional or hobby interest in computing will find this especially interesting, but even those with no particular interest in computers will still find the human story engaging.

`The Soul of a New Machine' is a landmark journalistic book-length essay by then `Atlantic Monthly' writer, Tracy Kidder exploring the development of a new computer in those pre-microcomputer days of 1978. I am delighted to find this book issued as a `classic', as I have read it many times and have been meaning to do a review of it for some time. I cannot think of a better occasion than with the release of this new edition. When it was first published, the book was a narrative of what was then `modern' technology, where the central processing units (CPU) or `brains' of commercial minicomputers and mainframe computers were built up on large circuit boards from individual, specialized integrated circuit chips, with each chip integrating dozens or hundreds of discrete components. This compares to today's microcomputers where the entire CPU is placed on a single chip incorporating tens of thousands of discrete functions, all taking up no more room than the average credit card. Now, the book is more a history of how this technology was developed, and yet its picture of how people work in teams developing technological projects will probably never go out of date. The irony of this book is that the computer being developed by the team described in this book, a 32 bit Eclipse computer developed by the Data General corporation, a competitor to the larger and very successful Digital Computer Corporation (Digital), did not really achieve any major breakthrough in technology. While it was intended to compete with a new generation of Digital VAX machines, it ended up being just barely faster than VAX's in a few special tasks. In fact, in a conversation I once had with some Digital engineers, they said that when they went head to head with Data General in bidding for a computer sale, the only thing they had to do was bring out Kidder's book to demonstrate that the Data General box was yesterday's news. Data General may have had the last laugh, as ailing Digital was bought out by Compaq, which has since merged with H-P, further submerging the once great Digital presence in the commercial computer world. Meanwhile, Data General is still around, albeit not the presence it once had when the `minicomputer' was the great alternative to the IBM monoliths in the glass houses. That does not detract from the fact that this is still a terrific story. I have read it several times and still quote from it after nearly thirty years of reading from it the first time. My favorite image is of the engineer who quit the project to become a farmer, so that the smallest unit of time he had to deal with was the season. My second favorite quote (which may not be original to this book, although this is the first time I ran into it) is that the management style on the project was the mushroom theory. That is, `Keep them in the dark and feed them s**t'. As I see from Kidder's new introduction, this essay was a bigger accomplishment that it seemed originally, as Kidder was closer to being a Luddite than he was a techie in love with the latest computer tool which, at that time, would have been standalone word processing machines produced by companies such as IBM and Wang. In spite of that limitation, he manages to make it interesting to both the average reader and someone like myself who is (or at least was) familiar with the inner workings of computers. I also tend to see Kidder's book as the fountainhead of a whole wave of new style journalistic book length works. I almost like to believe that Kidder made possible the writing careers of my foodie-writing hero, Michael Ruhlman (`The Soul of a Chef' and `The Making of a Chef'). The similarity in title of Ruhlman's book with Kidder's title is, I think, not an accident. So, this is not only a history of a major moment in computer history, it is a superb picture of the dynamics of people in technical development teams and the challenges of achieving a technical goal. Must read for everyone.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

I bought and read this book shortly after it was published. Tracy Kidder is gifted, and this book is still unique. I won't repeat the other accolades -- the book merits them -- but I will share some of the insights the book provides into technology projects. I have never heard a better description of the motivation for hardware and software projects than "shipping out a box with your name on the side of it". This arose from the then common practice of the development team all autographing the first production shipment. It's hard to define this motivation...it's not money, although that's what journalists usually attribute it to. "Look what I made" is somewhat closer to the motivation, but not really there. If you are a manager of high-tech projects, read this book and get a feel for what unified the team. Another unifying factor was the second-best aura. Not only was Data General behind DEC, but the books team was considered a second string group, and the North Carolina team got all the resources and attention from management. But they fell behind, and Kidder's team had a chance to save the day. If you are a manager, you are going to be in this situation someday. If you are considering computer science as a career...this book resonates with a piece of advice which I frequently give. Don't get into CS or EE because you think you will make money. Get into it because you love what you are doing. That's one more factor behind the insane hours and ludicruous commitments this team undertook. So...after over 35 years in the computer business...I have not found any other book which captures the milieu like The Soul Of A New Machine. Highly recommended.

Forget the obsolete tech, but focus on the human motivations in this story. This is a very well-written and enjoyable true story set in an earlier decade of the computer industry. But the kind of pressure that team was under is still a big factor in many companies. A cautionary tale for those with ears to hear.

Although Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize winner,

Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" is over 20 years old now, and for a book about the creation of a new microcomputer and the engineers that worked on it, that's a very long time. Not necessarily about technology - a computers are by and large still Von Nuemann machines, and the principles are the same - but the engineer and the computer geek have become part of the culture in a way they weren't in 1980. The book, as a result, lacks some freshness to a modern reader - the bleary-eyed devotion of the engineer is an old story by now. It's rarely told as well as it is here, though; Kidder has a knack for prose and handles everything well. The passages on computer technology slow down a little, but are still fairly impressive considering the ground he has to cover. The engineers, their quirks and motivations and doubts are depicted well, and he captures the drive and obsession with the machine and the long drag of testing as well as anything I've read. So even if the driven engineer is old hat by now, Kidder's book is still a great tome of the curious creation of a new machine.

This book was written in the late 1970's. I first read it in 1981. It is about the challenges faced in cresting a new computer architecture and focuses on a company called Data General. I had worked on their equipment and was intrigued by the book because it had gotten good press. The story is compelling and has many aspects that we still see today when company's try to innovate, including internal competition. The book had a strong effect on me, as I joined Data General a year later. I met several people mentioned in the book and I can honestly say the author did a fine and accurate job describing who they were. Following the journey they went through was enlightening, with all of the ups, downs and the final sad sobering conclusion. It catches a piece of history and puts a human face it.

Even though this book is about a product developed more than 20 years ago, and the technology used back then is clearly obselete, this book is one of the best I've ever read that describes the truth behind computer developement, and as a computer scientist for over a decade, I've read quite a few. This book gets 5 stars because... Most of the environment Tracy describes regarding computer developement in this book STILL APPLIES today (the exception being that nowadays, with computer components much cheaper and produced in much greater amounts, people don't have to struggle as much for shared time on few terminals and test machines). Examples mentioned in the book that still apply today in computers include: - Tight deadlines that are seemingly never met and frequently pushed forwards (in computer science, you never know how long a programming project takes until you're actually finished with it, and it always takes at least 3x longer than you initially thought). - Unpredictable computer errors that crawl in at every other moment, and being forced to accept the fact that your product will never be perfect. ("Quick and Dirty" is the rule, not the exception in the computer industry...) - The programmers' and engineers' overtime out of love for their product at the cost of their personal lives (and sleep time). - The company politics and the importance of keeping beauraucratic and administrative issues out of the way of developers so that they get some REAL WORK done. (Tom West, manipulator of Data General's politics, is the most significant example of this mentioned in the book.) - The miscommunications between developement and marketing, and how this can leads to important discoveries being forgotten or ignored. (Note: Data General isn't the only company to have suffered from this in history. This is believed to be what put Commodore out of business!) Furthermore, Tracy is very good at communicating these issues and more in a manner that any average Joe can understand. Plus, his portrayal of each developer, and their perspective they provide into the Eagle machine, left me fooled into believing I personally knew these people in real life!

As one who lived and worked in this field through the era that Kidder described, I can tell you that his book totally and accurately captures it. Whether from the marketing standpoint, the business standpoint, the historical standpoint, or (the focus of the book) the engineering development and people standpoint, he got it onto the page. It is also a fun, interesting, and even suspenseful read. As its NY Times reviewer said (as quoted on the flyleaf of the hardback) it is understandable even if you are nontechnical and can't tell software from hardware. Kidder copyrighted it in 1981--the year the first IBM PC came out. It is thus really interesting to read this book from a 2007 perspective, since a lot of what has happened in the PC-microcomputer era is **just** like what Kidder described in 1981 at what turned out to be the end of the minicomputer era. Enjoy!!

This is an accomplished book but to me it fails to tackle the central issue, what is the soul of the machine ? Obviously the ingenuity of people to create a working computer. The descriptions of this in the book provide some of the finest moments. As to the root of inspiration Kidder says these engineers all have natural talent and were fiddling around with dismantling watches, radios and the like when the rest of us were playing in sand pits at age four. Just as intriguing is the point that making computers to do certain jobs isn't cost effective, so why do it ? On top of this is the notion that the engineers give little thought as to what the computer is to be used for. It could be for anything from military or scientific research to use in an insurance company. Perhaps the books construction is at fault here. it raises these important and intriguing issues then fails to tackle them convinvingly. Was the author writing with a book plan in mind ? or was it a happen-by-chance fly-on-the wall journal that happened to become a book ? The book is good, well structured and the story is kept interesting, though I felt it lets the real story get away.

Will the Eagle ever be built? What is going wrong with the engineering team? Why would anyone devote 80-hours a week to building a machine from levels of signals to software? A narrative that will suck you in with heroism, pathos, all those goodies, and the technical details of computers in the late 1970s (before the PC revolution).

Tracy Kidder is one of those people who can write comfortably about a variety of subjects. Whether it is school children or nursing home residents or, in this case, modern engineers and creators, he manages to give us a glimpse of their essence. He manages to delve and reveal their very soul. I read this book some time ago and marvelled at how it remained in my thoughts for some time afterward. The hopes, the dreams, the interaction, the sheer act of pure thought - these are all captured in brilliant prose right before our eyes. And in spite of all the problems, barriers, egos and behind-the-door dealings, we see a corporate project progress and understand (finally) that all such endeavors are, in the end, human ones. Men and women stretching the bounds of technology is what has always defined our race. We are the technological animal, the creature that uses other materials to enhance our life. Great story - great book.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

My father bought a copy for me when it came out in hopes of inspiring something, probably seeing how miserable business school was making me. I loved every page and, though I never quite made it into engineering, I did manage to escape accounting for software and carve myself out a career. I'll never forget the rush I felt while touring a bank data center in the early 80's and spotting that baby blue Eclipse mini in the corner. No one else in the group had read the book and they all thought I was nuts; I wanted to hug the thing! I'm sure this book launched more than few IT careers of my generation and, while the world has certainly changed, much in this glimpse of geek-before-geek-was-cool subculture still rings true today.

I found this book to be a very interesting analysis of the development lifecycle of a new computer. What made it even more interesting was the fact that it is now twenty years old, which makes it practically prehistoric by computer industry standards, yet the intensity and method of attack have really not changed all that dramatically for the developers. It's like going back in a time capsule to a fascinating period in this industry. Also adding to the story was the level of access that Data General gave to the author. I would be very surprised if that would happen today, but it adds a level of knowledge that really draws the reader into the story. There were some humorous moments too - I loved the Mushroom Theory of Management: "Feed them s**t, put 'em in a dark room, and see what grows". Terrific stuff!

If you follow the current history of high-end and consumer technology to any degree, and care about the conditions under which it is created to eventually affect your life, consider getting a copy of this book. If you've been intrigued by the stories you heard about the beginnings of companies like Microsoft or Apple, this book will give you great backstory for those events. This book is a transition between the buttoned-down, dogma-driven company-man era of IBM and the decades in which a couple of greasy guys in a garage could change the entire planet. It is a story of cultural change, and engineering problems solved with soldering irons and trash-talk.

After 25 years of software development, most of it on 'Impossible' projects, I find my 1981 printing to be one of my prized posessions. When you're so tired from months of 75 hour weeks it hurts to get up in the morning, and the project's still not done, its wonderfully reassuring to know that you are part of a relativly few persons who have breathed life into a whole new force in the history of human-kind. As a new generation of CS professionals joins our ranks its comforting to know that those who built the foundations of the industry will not be forgotten. And for the new crew, this book provides ample inspiration for all who wish to join the crusade. A great gift, particularly if signed by a project leader at the end of a long and difficult project! Buy the hardback if you can find it and pass it down as a family heirloom. If you can possibley get there, read this book at Lake Powell Arizona. If you don't come back inspired you're legally dead! Next to the good book, this one rulz!

As an engineer in high-tech, I assumed our culture of evolved as quickly as our livelihood. Not so, I found, reading about the engineering mindset ("It doesn't matter if you're ugly or graceless or even half crazy; if you produce right results in this world, your colleagues must accept you."), the inability to *completely* verify a design ("it would be possible to test fully... but it would take literally forever to do so."), that we all like video games and Star Trek, that the term "gunslinger" (someone who "shoots from the hip") isn't something our generation of engineers coined, and that what drives us today is the same that drove the previous two generations of engineers ("I'll have to work hard, and if we do a good job, we get to do it again."). Instead of writing an account of engineers building a computer chip, Kidder has created an allegory exposing the roots of engineering to genererations beyond. Wish I had read this early in my career to know what I have to look forward to... "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

Hopefully, the recent release of Tracy Kidder's "Mountains Beyond Mountains" will cause some people to go back and look at his impressive body of previous work. Most notably, there's this early eighties effort about Data General's attempts to design and bring a new minicomputer to market in less than a year. No better book has ever been written about the process of birthing an IT product and running the project to get it done. 'Soul' was written before Project Management became recognized as a discipline. Even so, there's never been a better project manager than Tom West, the head of the team depicted in 'Soul' and the very heart of the book.

The author presents an honest, personal, incisive look at the personalities, politics, passion, drama, and grind of a group of engineers who “sign up” to build a 32-bit computing machine at Data General in the late 70s.

I read this while getting my Masters in Computer Science, decades ago, and found it very current and helpful. Now it might still be interesting, but would be highly dated, as 25% of the information in that industry changes every year. Back then, it would have rated 5 stars. Now, maybe 3 for anyone other than a historian, so averaged it to 4. Well written and enjoyable; just about stuff you can't even buy any more, and wouldn't want to if you could.

This book, this first best-known book to emerge from Kidder's credible and entertaining non-fiction oeuvre, chronicles the efforts of a group of computer enthusiasts to develop and then gain stake in the then-young (1980) industry. But this book is more than a mere study of technology and its seemingly pervasive sphere of influence. The books speaks to the inherent nature of equity and the just rewards when coupled with good intentions of individuals from where all ideas (great and otherwise) emerge. This book is a judicious and lasting gift to those who know and realize the more positive efforts arising from work in technological field. Highly recommend

A non-fiction novel about a company (Data General) building a computer in the early 1980s. How could that be entertaining? Well, it won a Pulitzer Prize, so that might pique our interest a little. Ah, now I see. It's more about the people building the computer than the computer and the computer industry. The interaction, the relationships, the stress, striving for a goal, working as a team. Tension. Failure. Then Success (or is it?). Any book that you can still vividly remember fifteen years after you read it is a great book--which is why the publisher recently reprinted it. Check it out. You'll read this book fast.

This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina - as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. However, the story begins in Massachusetts.... Tom West, an engineering manager in Massachusetts, manages to convince the management that it would be worthwhile to have a 'back-up' 32-bit computer system, that was perhaps backwards compatible with their old 16-bit systems. It would be a sort of 'insurance' so to speak in case development efforts in North Carolina took too long. With a handful of experienced engineers as team leaders, he recruits essentially fresh college graduates and works the hell out of them to create a rival 32-bit computer system. Over the course of the book, it becomes apparent that the North Carolina facility - despite having more resources, money, engineers, etc. - will not in fact be able to launch their product in a timely fashion. West's team of new recruits really does need to release their product in order for the company to continue competing in the mini-computer market. The book is not written so much on the technical details of the project, but rather is more of a 'documentary' of the experience of being on the product development team. The level of detail this book captures, and at each level (from West's perspective, the perspective of a number of the fresh college graduates, his experienced Team Leaders who speculated on West's motives in driving everyone so hard, the background situation of the company and management) is perfect. Looking back historically, one could easily just conclude that the Massachusetts team succeeded for all sorts of technical reasons. But there were a lot of interesting human reasons for why the project succeeded. For one, the project should have never been started in Massachusetts in the first place. The company management did not seem to have any clear idea of what to put their engineers to work on (or even really know what they were working on) and a wily manager was able to sneak the project by, masquerading it as something else. As engineer on a product development team for a robotic system, I can 100% relate to this book. The ridiculous management decisions, the company politics, engineers working insane hours on esoteric problems, the strange culture of engineers, the product launch and general lack of appreciation for the engineer's work afterwards - it's amazingly well captured in this book, and I was surprised at how my current company and previous company experiences relate so strongly to the product development described here. What I liked most about it, was that a lot of the decisions made by West, the company, etc were highly irrational, if you looked at them from the company perspective. The company SHOULD have only had one group working on the development project. West SHOULD have explained to his team the importance of what they were working on and perhaps been more involved on the day to day decisions of the project, just as the VP of Engineering SHOULD have been more cognizant of what West's entire team was up to. (The author writes about 'mushroom management' in the book - keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em *edited by Amazon Censors*). But in reality, for often political reasons, feuds, the strange driven personality of a particular manager, the strange management practices of the CEO, all of these mistakes get made, and yet a 32-bit mini computer gets built and saves the company in the end anyway. It's a great book because it is all true. I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone that doesn't work in product development, but for me, I see this mistakes made in my company every day. It's amazing how much individual personalities, and strange coincidences can drive a project. An additional tidbit, Wired magazine did a follow up with all of the engineers years after this book was written: "[...]" Google 'O, Engineers!', 'Soul of a New Machine, Wired' in case Amazon gets rid of the link. A great book.

The Soul of a New Machine is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view. Through the narrative, Tracy Kidder adeptly illuminates the engineering psyche: the rush derived from the freedom to create, the sensation of being "lost in the machine", the feeling of power that comes from bringing order to chaos, the personal identity associated with creation. The book elucidates the paradoxical competing motivations that inspire an employee to maintain a daunting schedule that eclipses their personal life. Tracy may understand engineers better than they understand themselves. In fact, as an engineer, I understand myself better after reading this book. Being set in the late 1970s, the book provides the reader with an authentic glimpse into a bygone era when yellow legal pads and pencils were essential engineering tools. What's surprising is the similarities to modern-day. Engineers are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions: can machines think, what are the ethical implications of computing, what's the perfect balance between done and right? Then and now, engineers are attempting to cope with the "long-term tiredness" resulting from the rampant pace of innovation that can render a recent graduate more skilled than an industry veteran. The human component remains the most perplexing. In the end, "people are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands." The book serves as a refreshing reminder that although technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the design process remains much the same. In conclusion, The Soul of a New Machine should be required reading for business and engineering students alike. The enduring lessons are to hire smart people, enable them, and get out of their way. Engineers thrive on agency and the potential to materialize their conceptions. No amount of external motivation can breathe commiserate vitality into a design process. If you are an engineer or a manager, do yourself a favor: read and understand The Soul of a New Machine.

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about smart young men who pour their lives into projects in order to see them succeed. It’s about their lack of social skill, their strange coping mechanisms, and their bonds of brotherhood and friendship. Such displays are familiar to anyone who has spent much time around engineers. In Kidder’s telling, these engineers give this product supreme meaning for a couple years of their life. Kidder’s journalistic act won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s amazing how he transforms mundane engineering practices into a fast-paced drama. His ability to empathize with average engineers (especially as a non-engineer) confounds me. He describes this scene as exciting for the masses when most non-engineers would consider such adventures as boring. This work still interesting to read almost forty years later. So what is the soul of a computer? To Kidder, it’s about working hard on a project to which one has given supreme importance. It’s about a team coming together despite their social hang-ups. It’s about pushing a product out only to have marketers and business-people claim its inventive force as their own. It’s about not just the circuit boards and software but the people who create the computer for us.

This book should be on the desk of every manager of technical projects in the US. More than any other work in history, it shows how innovation occurs, and how a few near-genius and hard-working individuals can get things done. It also shows modern organizational theory to be badly flawed, and that the much vaunted group-dynamics and teamwork cannot replace a few bright minds who are dedicated to inventing a new product. The Apple Computer is an example of the concept I'm describing: Steve Wozniac invented the Apple in his garage, and Steve Jobs marketed it. Amazing, isn't it -- one man essentially created the personal computer all by himself. All alone, not even with a team made of diverse talents and representing various viewpoints. All they do is create kludges that require incessant maintenance and updates. Sound familiar?

I read this Pol based on few recommendations, it took me a while to finish it though. I find certain part of the book to detailed and boring eventually I had to put effort t finish it all. I cannot say it is bad written, on the contrary it reads well however the subject and the way to tell the story is not my way. Overall a classical book strongly recommended if you are a manager as it explains how to build a group of achiever and potentially shows the aftermath of great success.

I liked this book. The development of the MV/8000 was taking place about the time I was becoming involved in computers, and by the time it hit the market I was a field service engineer working on IBM mainframes, and playing around with a PDP-11 when I could. It was very interesting to read the account of how the hardware and microcode were developed, especially in light of the training I had in essentially similar microcoded machines around the same time frame. On the other hand, even after having read the entire book I still don't really get the feeling I understand what made a couple of the central players tick. Maybe the author never really figured it out either. Anyway, it's well written and well worth reading, especially if you can relate to the way things were "way back" at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.

A bunch of people haphazardly come together to build a new computer and with trust from their managers and earnest desire to excel in their craft manage to bring the damn thing to life. I personally found this relatable on so many levels; not only the pastiche of people working on the project but also the range of company politics and bickering. This book punched me in the stomach purely from the fact that the project's leader, Tom West, blatantly describes the power of trust to lead teams. An easy 10/10 recommendation from me to any technical person who will inevitably hit some kind of existential crisis in their career and find this book enlightening as it did for me.

I got started in computer technology after the era of mainframe computers, so I had no idea of the technology involved. This book covers the design process, high-level technical details, and the community of people involved in designing these computers. It's particularly interesting to read about the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit, long before personal computers made a similar transition. Many of the challenges faced during the events covered by this book had to be solved all over again in the personal computer world, so having this earlier perspective is very educational. The most impressive aspect of this book is that the author was allowed inside the company to document details that must have been secret and under non-disclosure at the time. Getting the story after the fact, from people's recollection of the events, would not nearly have been as accurate as this author's ongoing documentation. I think that may be the most important contribution. I've been involved in serious computer operating system design teams, and subsequently read books by authors who attempted to piece together the facts years later - and they inevitably got many facts wrong. I get the impression that this book is an order of magnitude more accurate than competing retrospectives on computer design projects. You should read this book!

That this book won the Pulitzer is no surprise. It combines a deft hand at journalism with a subject that at the time was probably little known, though now, 30+ years later, it is very well known. It is chic now to be geek. In the early 80s such was not the case. Data General, left the stage in 1999 when it was acquired by another company. But when it was making new computers, and the men assigned to make new computers, that was a time little grasped by the world. Kidder is able to inform us of that time, but then he also goes to extremes such as always describing like a terrible dime store mystery, each member of the team when he introduces them. What he thinks might be infusing these sketches with depth actually reads like details from an index card that have to be injected in a particular order. Then, he does not seem to have a computer persons understanding of a computer. He breaks up the distinction between hardware and software and thinks he gives us and overview of what the two are doing but as a geek, as a writer of software and a electronics lab guy in high school, I am at a loss to understand what he was trying to say. That disconnect just does not hold up. We want to understand more about the boards constructed and how system language was so important on a new 32 bit project. Kidder captures that a team went in and built a computer that had not been built before, but there were other 32 bit computers out there already and profiling the first, the challenges to overcome from 16 bit to 32 bit, or really focusing on why this 32 bit was so much better, was needed. This is not anywhere near the iconic Insanely Great. And for that it suffers.

What an great and interesting book. I understood (to a point) what they were taking about goes way back to my college days with assembler and working at that very low level. The bits where they are using oscilloscopes to take pictures to see what the machines are doing I would have liked to have been there. If you can take the side off a computer and identify each piece you will enjoy this book. If you can look at the chips on a MOBO and know their function you will REALLY like this book.

The subject of building a mini-computer does not sound like a good read, but this really is an interest book that engrossed me. Found the team dynamics and personalities interesting and also learned a lot about computers and how they are built. I used some of these computers as an engineer and found it interesting to learn how the computer companies competed and then lost out to the micro computers.

I remember one of my engineering professors told me to get this book many years ago, after I had finished a computer systems engineering degree - and it was a fantastic recommendation. This book is a truly great read !! Kidder takes all the intricacies of engineering, along with the process of building a great computer, and packages it all into a book that you can read on a cool and balmy Saturday afternoon with a tall glass of lemonade next to you. A really great read !