The Soul of a New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

ALL THE WAY to the horizon in the last light, the sea was just degrees of gray, rolling and frothy on the surface.

Sometime late that night, one of the crew raised a voice against the wind and asked, “What are we trying to prove?”

The ocean doesn’t care about you. It makes your boat feel tiny. The oceans are great promoters of religion, or at least of humility—but not in everyone.

“What they call tough auditing, we call thievery.”

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.

“But we can’t understand why we’re tabloid, instead of the New York Times

Executives might make the final decisions about what would be produced, but engineers would provide most of the ideas for new products. After all, engineers were the people who really knew the state of the art and who were therefore best equipped to prophesy changes in it.

You did not have to be the first company to produce the new kind of machine; sometimes, in fact, it was better not to be the first. But you had to produce yours before the new market really opened up and customers had made other marriages. For once they are lost, both old and prospective customers are often gone for good.

He doesn’t talk fast or raise his voice. He conveys—it’s not enthusiasm exactly, it’s the intensity of someone who’s weathering a storm and showing us the way out.

“West brought us out of our depression into the honesty of pure work.

West rarely lent his enthusiasm to “someone else’s trip,” Alsing noted. “But if it’s his own or he makes it his own…”

Cray said that he liked to hire inexperienced engineers right out of school, because they do not usually know what’s supposed to be impossible.

You’re working at a place that looks like something psychologists build for testing the fortitude of small animals, and your boss won’t even say hello to you.

Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing.

“It was kind of like recruiting for a suicide mission. You’re gonna die, but you’re gonna die in glory.”

In computers, an architecture describes what a machine will look like to the people who are going to write software for it. It tells not how the machine will be built, but what it will do, in detail.

IT WAS THE HOUR of insomniacs.

Conventional algebra sets rules about the relationships between numbers. Boolean algebra expresses relationships between statements. It is a system of logic; it sets general conditions under which combinations of statements are either true or false.

At the level of the microcode, physical and abstract meet. The microcode controls the actual circuits.

Not many years before, in most computers, the “/”, once it had been translated into its constituent assembly-language instructions, would have been fed right into the actual circuits. A computer in which the stairway ends there, at the level of assembly language, is said to be “hard-wired.”

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

What another of West’s old hands called “a long-term tiredness” can easily creep over computer engineers in their thirties.

they asked. They learned something, Alsing felt. “If a person knows how to get the right secretary, he can get everything.

“There’s a thing you learn at Data General, if you work here for any period of time,” said West’s lieutenant of hardware, Ed Rasala. “That nothing ever happens unless you push it.”

Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well. Asked for a translation, he smiled and said, “If you can do a quick-and-dirty job and it works, do it.”

there’s no such thing as a perfect design. Most experienced computer engineers I talked to agreed that absorbing this simple lesson constitutes the first step in learning how to get machines out the door. Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection.

It was the apartment of a young man going elsewhere, and it made me feel old.

“I’ve gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I’m gonna go mad.”

“Trust is risk, and risk avoidance is the name of the game in business,”

“I don’t want to be a bad guy. I just want to get something done.”

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.

Rasala once remarked, “Yeah, the further you get from doing it yourself, the more demons you see.”

In theory, a computer can mimic the behavior of anything. It can do so accurately only if the thing being imitated is thoroughly defined.

The fact of a string of previous successes, though, could imply the imminence of failure. “Realistically, you gotta lose one sometime,” he said with a small smile.

“The way to stay on schedule,” he said, “is to make another one.”

“An oscilloscope,” said Jim Veres of the Hardy Boys, “is what cavemen used to debug fire.”

The slow advance of the morning sun across his windshield, when he makes the turn into the parking lot, has been one of the principal ways by which he has kept track of outside, planetary time.

“It doesn’t matter how hard you work on something,” says Holberger. “What counts is finishing and having it work.”

As they say, the first step in fixing something is getting it to break.

“Part of the fascination,” he said, “is just little boys who never grew up, playing with Erector sets. Engineers just don’t lose that, and if you do lose it, you just can’t be an engineer anymore.” He went on: “When you burn out, you lose enthusiasm.

I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.

From time to time, Rasala and Alsing would tell some of their troops that West was acting as a buffer between them and the company bureaucrats, but the two managers didn’t go into details. To do so would have violated West’s unspoken orders—“an unspoken agreement,” said Alsing, “that we won’t pass on the garbage and the politics.”

His whole notion is that he doesn’t want to fight for petty wins when there’s a bigger game in town.”

“The postpartum depression on this project is gonna be phenomenal. These guys don’t realize how dependent they are on that thing to create their identities. That’s why we gotta get the new things in place.”

Norbert Weiner coined the term cybernetics in order to describe the study of “control and communication in the animal and the machine.”

dissenter could indeed refuse to do work that might end up in the hands of soldiers: that would mean, in effect, not being a computer engineer.

“science fiction has a lot of optimism in it. I mean, we made it that far at least.

“It’s the kind of problem where you push in the clutch and the horn works.”

Ruskin makes the crucial point that a thing may also be judged according to the conditions under which it was built. Presumably the stonemasons who raised the cathedrals worked only partly for their pay. They were building temples to God. It was the sort of work that gave meaning to life.

Then he said: “Look, I don’t have to get official recognition for anything I do. Ninety-eight percent of the thrill comes from knowing that the thing you designed works, and works almost the way you expected it would. If that happens, part of you is in that machine.”