The Soul of a New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

but also to make plain to investors and financial analysts that Data General really is a thrifty outfit.

Someone unaccustomed to reading financial reports might have missed the full import of the numbers on the screen, the glee and madness in them. But anyone could see that they started small and got big fast. Mechanically, monotonously, the computer in the case was telling an old familiar story—the international, materialistic fairy tale come true.

Probably IBM could not have controlled this new market, the way it did the one for large computers. 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.

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.