Paperback, 293 pages
Undetermined language
Published June 1, 2000 by Little, Brown and Company.
"The Soul of a New Machine" is a non-fiction book written by Tracy Kidder and published in 1981. It chronicles the experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure. The machine was launched in 1980 as the Data General Eclipse MV/8000. The book won the 1982 National Book Award for Non-fiction and a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
Good read. I'm not sure if it would have been so enjoyable for someone who isn't a computer programmer.
This is a classic computer history book but unique in the fact that it was written while the Data General Eclipse MV/8000 (code named Eagle) was being developed in the 1979-1980 time frame. This was DG's answer to DEC's VAX and their first 32-bit machine. Kidder was embedded with the team as a journalist with no computer background whatsoever. This comes in handy because computers were exotic things which most people had only seen in movies. It is hard to imagine, even for someone like me that was a computer obsessed kid in that era but he's describing floppy disks as "an object almost the exact shape and size as a 45-rpm record" or a hard disk module as a football helmet. He describes what computer memory in details that make it sound huge for the day but are 1000s of times smaller than today. However the level of detail …
This is a classic computer history book but unique in the fact that it was written while the Data General Eclipse MV/8000 (code named Eagle) was being developed in the 1979-1980 time frame. This was DG's answer to DEC's VAX and their first 32-bit machine. Kidder was embedded with the team as a journalist with no computer background whatsoever. This comes in handy because computers were exotic things which most people had only seen in movies. It is hard to imagine, even for someone like me that was a computer obsessed kid in that era but he's describing floppy disks as "an object almost the exact shape and size as a 45-rpm record" or a hard disk module as a football helmet. He describes what computer memory in details that make it sound huge for the day but are 1000s of times smaller than today. However the level of detail of the engineering but in layman's terms are great too. I'm not a hardware person so reading about how they would build and debug a computer like that in that era is totally foreign to me, so this was very insightful. He didn't just cover the tech aspects though. He got into the backgrounds of the major players, the political corporate dynamics, and the mindset of engineers. Even though the computers and software we build today are radically different in scale it is fascinating how much of it is the same. This is a five star book for anyone with a moderate interest in computer history or maybe even business history, since it details business side stuff too, including some shady stuff DG did in the early-70s that I didn't know about. If it isn't an area of interest it will probably seem too slow or dry because you get way in the weeds on all of the little details. I wish more books about computer history were written this way. It really put you into the moment since it was literally written embedded with the team in that moment.
This book is beautifully written. I reads like a wistful memoir for the life of a machine. The story is of the creation of Project Eagle in the Late 70's/Early 80's at Data General. If you are interested in computers, their history, or how they were dreamed up and made, this is essential reading. I loved reading about the creation of a computer during the age when people thought that they were going to be the impetus of revolution. This is really a love letter for the wild-west age of computing.
