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4.07 AVERAGE
4.07 AVERAGE
What Kidder wrote about computer technology development in 1980 could have been written today about so much technology development. Makes it interesting, funny and human. Required reading for anyone in the field and recommended for everyone.
adventurous
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
It’s a nice enough story, it’s just poorly written. Every sentence starts backwards, and the flow is really poor. I cannot recommend unless you are specifically very interested in Data General and their 32 bit computer.
The Soul of a New Machine struck me because of its brilliant illustration of the power of journalism. One often hears that journalism is the first draft of history, but this book reminds me of wonderful history books written by respected historians. It has the broad outsider perspective and the story-like narrative of a work of history. Simply put, the book is a record of a small scale human endeavor. This work is a good glimpse into the lives of computer engineers in the (relatively) early days of the computer revolution. There is nothing particularly dramatic or enlightening about this book, but it can make for a leisure reading for modern computer engineers. The book asks these questions: what does it take to make a new product? what does it take to be remembered?
As someone leading a small group of engineers in the tech industry (well, a tech-heavy industry) it was interesting to read detailed account of a tech project run 40 years earlier. This was also a problem since so much was familiar and unsurprising, compared to how it must have been to the readers that awarded this a Pulitzer. Despite advances in technology, much hasn't changed. The tension between pragmatic businessmen and perfectionist engineers, the struggle for demographic diversity, the casting of work-life balance as anathema to success, the miraculous feeling when the system you designed is implemented and actually works, the endless apparently hopeless bugs.
This book is written well, but not spectacular. It's a long magazine article. But it's interesting enough.
This book is written well, but not spectacular. It's a long magazine article. But it's interesting enough.
medium-paced
I chose a book poorly trying to branch out in interests. Was very nicely written, especially the prologue, but I simply wasn't interested. I discovered that the retrospective of how the computer industry was operating at the very beginning was intriguing but not enough for me, not particularly interested in computers, to want to read a whole book about.
This was fascinating. I have no idea how Kidder got so deeply inside the team and all the individuals portrayed in this book. It makes me regret not being born decades earlier so I could have been part of this, while also making me profoundly grateful that I don't have to know anything about hardware :)
adventurous
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced