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4.07 AVERAGE
4.07 AVERAGE
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Captures the thrill of creating a new computer very accurately and it's a very intriguing, inspiring story. However, the actual work culture that was presented is another topic that I'm not positive towards. Besides that, I think that it is a great book and should be read by budding programmers to wet their appetite. Also, it serves as a reminder of what a great workplace should be.
informative
medium-paced
If you’re in the computer industry, this is a great historical view of what the early days of the minicomputer development process was like. It’s a part of history that doesn’t have a lot of press around it so it’s very neat to get to see this exposed.
funny
informative
medium-paced
Perhaps more impactful when originally published (1981).
Hold on to your hats, kids! We're taking a trip back to the late 70s, where there were more than 2 or 3 types of computer to choose between, but they cost half a million dollars and were the size of refrigerators. This book relates the development of a new computer at Data General, a highly successful manufacturer of the time, though forgotten today.
This is really one of those plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose things. While it is so much of its era - maybe the bronze age of the computer industry - so many things have barely changed. Seeing which things are identical and which are unrecognizable is one of the fascinating things about this extremely interesting book.
Having worked in the broad field of computing for 15 years, the processes of developing and delivering a technical project were at the same time familiar and alien to me. The speccing, creating, iterating, integrating, debugging are described very convincingly and were very recognizable. But the way those things were achieved - the equipment used, the amount of documentation, the way issues were tracked - was all very different to practices today (and for good reasons at the time). I would have enjoyed a bit more technical detail, but then I imagine that I'm a bit more technically proficient than the target audience.
The characters of the engineers, their goals, and the counter-intuitively dysfunctional ways of getting the most out of them is remarkably similar to what one might encounter in the field of computing today (to be honest, I'm only familiar with development on the software side, but I assume the same broadly hold true on the hardware side). This project tended to use much younger engineers than standard in the industry, and motivated them by giving them a high level of responsibility for their particular areas - which meant they felt that they had to work ridiculous hours. This was good for those involved, but also meant that the creation of the machine was much cheaper than it would have been with more experienced people working regular hours (that said, it also came with a higher risk of failure).
Additionally, the office politics of a large tech company are well depicted, and should be instantly recognisable to anyone who's ever worked in such an organisation.
The story of the creation of the machine has some strong parallels with Revolution in the Valley - about the develpoment of the first Mac (remarkably only about 5 years later). In both, the computer was thought of (at most) secondary importance within the companies building them. And both had a team of highly-motivated, young engineers driving them forward, with ridiculous workloads, and thriving on their "outsider" status. Data General's computer was not revolutionary like Apple's, but that is not really what this book is about. It is a fascinating insight into the inner workings of the computer industry - a field which affects all our lives and yet is somewhat opaque. It is remarkable both as a historical account, and also for how relevant it is today.
This is really one of those plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose things. While it is so much of its era - maybe the bronze age of the computer industry - so many things have barely changed. Seeing which things are identical and which are unrecognizable is one of the fascinating things about this extremely interesting book.
Having worked in the broad field of computing for 15 years, the processes of developing and delivering a technical project were at the same time familiar and alien to me. The speccing, creating, iterating, integrating, debugging are described very convincingly and were very recognizable. But the way those things were achieved - the equipment used, the amount of documentation, the way issues were tracked - was all very different to practices today (and for good reasons at the time). I would have enjoyed a bit more technical detail, but then I imagine that I'm a bit more technically proficient than the target audience.
The characters of the engineers, their goals, and the counter-intuitively dysfunctional ways of getting the most out of them is remarkably similar to what one might encounter in the field of computing today (to be honest, I'm only familiar with development on the software side, but I assume the same broadly hold true on the hardware side). This project tended to use much younger engineers than standard in the industry, and motivated them by giving them a high level of responsibility for their particular areas - which meant they felt that they had to work ridiculous hours. This was good for those involved, but also meant that the creation of the machine was much cheaper than it would have been with more experienced people working regular hours (that said, it also came with a higher risk of failure).
Additionally, the office politics of a large tech company are well depicted, and should be instantly recognisable to anyone who's ever worked in such an organisation.
The story of the creation of the machine has some strong parallels with Revolution in the Valley - about the develpoment of the first Mac (remarkably only about 5 years later). In both, the computer was thought of (at most) secondary importance within the companies building them. And both had a team of highly-motivated, young engineers driving them forward, with ridiculous workloads, and thriving on their "outsider" status. Data General's computer was not revolutionary like Apple's, but that is not really what this book is about. It is a fascinating insight into the inner workings of the computer industry - a field which affects all our lives and yet is somewhat opaque. It is remarkable both as a historical account, and also for how relevant it is today.
Tracy Kidder put together a wonderfully rich and in-depth look at the inner workings of a team of designers working on a new minicomputer. With scarce resources, minimal corporate support, and little but what they could scrounge and their own intellectual prowess and determination, the team succeeded against all odds. And with Kidder's able help, we are right there with them. We see the manipulations, the generation of fierce commitment in the experienced and newbie alike, and the almost fanatical devotion to cause that was the beginning of a new movement and new expectations for employee commitment. Kidder wondered with some anxiety what it would lead to; with the advantage of more than two and a half decades, we can see the results.
adventurous
emotional
informative
medium-paced
Somehow, I was under the impression that this book was about the creation of Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX. So imagine my surprise when I started reading it and the author kept talking about some company called "Data General" which I'd never heard of before. (An interesting data point: the Wikipedia article on the computer developed in this book, the Data General Eclipse MV/8000, is a good order of magnitude shorter than the one on the VAX. But Data General survived as an independent company for a good year longer than DEC. I'm not sure what to make of this.)
So this book went smashing my expectations right from the start: it was about a computer I'd never heard of before made by a company I'd never heard of before and it was still fully engrossing. It turns out that this isn't really the story of a specific computer made at a specific company by a specific team; instead, it's the story of a Any Given Team of Computer Guys working to build Any Given Project. That they were working on crafting a CPU out of multiple wire-wrapped boards (which is just weird) is almost incidental.
It's incidental because the technical aspects of the story seem to merely add charm. "He turned back to plug a logic analyzer into Gollum." connects paragraphs to each other, but the real meat of the book is in describing the characters and personalities of each of the team members (particularly the main personality, Tom West who died earlier this year) and how each of them coped with the demanding schedules that such projects tend to demand.
This book is a fascinating bit of history (I've never knowingly used a computer without a microprocessor). It's an engaging and engrossing look at what it means to build a high-tech product these days (the beards are a little shorter these days, but everything else sounds about right). It's a good read. They don't hand Pulitzers out to just anyone, after all.
Ultimately, any dissatisfaction I find in this book comes from my own biases. I'm a software guy and I find it much easier to relate to people working on software projects. So I probably tend to prefer something like Zachary Pascal's Showstopper! which is the same sort of project history for Microsoft's Windows NT.
However, I can't help but compare this to a book I read last year, The Race for a New Game Machine by David Shippy. This newer book was simply awful. My holding it up to The Soul of a New Machine really serves to show just how good Soul is.
So this book went smashing my expectations right from the start: it was about a computer I'd never heard of before made by a company I'd never heard of before and it was still fully engrossing. It turns out that this isn't really the story of a specific computer made at a specific company by a specific team; instead, it's the story of a Any Given Team of Computer Guys working to build Any Given Project. That they were working on crafting a CPU out of multiple wire-wrapped boards (which is just weird) is almost incidental.
It's incidental because the technical aspects of the story seem to merely add charm. "He turned back to plug a logic analyzer into Gollum." connects paragraphs to each other, but the real meat of the book is in describing the characters and personalities of each of the team members (particularly the main personality, Tom West who died earlier this year) and how each of them coped with the demanding schedules that such projects tend to demand.
This book is a fascinating bit of history (I've never knowingly used a computer without a microprocessor). It's an engaging and engrossing look at what it means to build a high-tech product these days (the beards are a little shorter these days, but everything else sounds about right). It's a good read. They don't hand Pulitzers out to just anyone, after all.
Ultimately, any dissatisfaction I find in this book comes from my own biases. I'm a software guy and I find it much easier to relate to people working on software projects. So I probably tend to prefer something like Zachary Pascal's Showstopper! which is the same sort of project history for Microsoft's Windows NT.
However, I can't help but compare this to a book I read last year, The Race for a New Game Machine by David Shippy. This newer book was simply awful. My holding it up to The Soul of a New Machine really serves to show just how good Soul is.