The Soul of a New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

The oceans are great promoters of religion, or at least of humility—but not in everyone.

Then in the 1960s IBM produced a family of new computers, called the 360 line. It was a daring corporate undertaking. “We’re betting the company,” one IBM executive remarked. Indeed, the project cost somewhat more than the development of the atom bomb, but it paid off handsomely.

As it happened, IBM ignored it, and so the field was left open for aspiring entrepreneurs—often, in this case, young computer engineers who left corporate armies with dreams of building corporate armies of their own.

The biggest suit, the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of the industry, involved the Justice Department’s attempt to break up IBM. Virtually an entire large law firm was created to defend IBM in this case, which by 1980 had run ten years and had been in continuous trial for several.

IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were actually going to use them, not to middlemen, and this market required good manners. Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive.

I could talk to God, just like IBM.”

Much of the engineering of computers takes place in silence, while engineers pace in hallways or sit alone and gaze at blank pages.

Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well.

The two prototypes looked identical, except for their names. Taped across the top of each frame was a piece of paper. One read COKE, the other GOLLUM. When the machines were first put together, the team had planned to call them Coke and Pepsi, but Ken Holberger insisted that one be named Gollum,

“And I may not be the smartest designer in the world, a CPU giant, but I’m dumb enough to stick with it to the end.”

Wallach carried messages back and forth, and sometimes invented messages of his own, he said, in order to slip some nice new feature past West.