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When they chose their lawyer, who would deal with the financial community for them, they insisted that he invest some of his own money in their company. “We don’t want you running away if we get in trouble. We want you there protecting your own money,”
their lawyer insisted that each of the founders sell some of their holdings in the company and each “take down a million bucks.” This so that they could negotiate without the dread of losing everything (“Having to go back to your father’s gas station,” Richman called that nightmare). As for the name of the theory behind selling enough stock to become millionaires, Richman told me, “I don’t know how you put it in the vernacular. We called it the Fuck You Theory.”
Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC’s corporate organization. He felt that VAX was too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system by which various parts of the machine communicated with each other; for his taste, there was too much protocol involved. He decided that VAX embodied flaws in DEC’s corporate organization. The machine expressed that phenomenally successful company’s cautious, bureaucratic style. Was this true? West said it didn’t matter, it was a useful theory. Then he rephrased his opinions. “With VAX, DEC was trying to minimize the risk,” he
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Tom’s message is: ‘Are you guys gonna do it or sit on your ass and complain?’ It’s a challenge he throws at them. So he basically made us stop moaning about the demise of Westborough.”
They thought it would be just a refinement of the Eclipse, which was itself a refinement of the NOVA. “A wart on a wart on a wart,” one engineer said. “A bag on the side of the Eclipse.” Some even said that it would be a “kludge,” and this was the unkindest cut. Kludge is perhaps the most disdainful term in the computer engineer’s vocabulary: it conjures up visions of a machine with wires hanging out of it, of things fastened together with adhesive tape.
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.
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.
What, by contrast, would be one of the worst jobs? One that obliged an engineer to build a kludge.
Kludge made Alsing imagine a wheel built out of bricks, with wooden wedges in between them; such a thing might work, but no sane engineer would be proud to have designed it.
“West’s not a technical genius. He’s perfect for making it all work. He’s gotta move forward. He doesn’t put off the tough problem, the way I do. He’s fearless, he’s a great politician, he’s arbitrary, sometimes he’s ruthless.”
Moreover, he believed that since he could not write all of the code, then he couldn’t write any of it.
“If a person knows how to get the right secretary, he can get everything. It was a resourceful solution—one of the solutions I hoped they’d find.”
For example, Microkids and Hardy Boys are arguing. A Microkid wants the hardware to perform a certain function. A Hardy Boy tells him, “No way—I already did my design for microcode to do that.” They make a deal: “I’ll encode this for you, if you’ll do this other function in hardware.” “All right.” What a way to design a computer! “There’s no grand design,” thinks Rosen. “People are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands.”
On the Magic Marker board in his office, West wrote the following: 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.”
West reviewed all of the designs. Sometimes he slashed out features that the designers felt were useful and nice. He seemed consistently to underestimate the subtlety of what they were trying to do. All that a junior designer was likely to hear from him was “It’s right,” “It’s wrong,” or “No, there isn’t time.”
To some the design reviews seemed harsh and arbitrary and often technically shortsighted. Later on, though, one Hardy Boy would concede that the managers had probably known something he hadn’t yet learned: that there’s no such thing as a perfect design.
Opinions varied on how much they assisted then, but it seems that they did help the Hardy Boys surmount the first awful barrier: how to fix the machine enough so that they could really fix it.
Rasala once remarked, “Yeah, the further you get from doing it yourself, the more demons you see.”
But one day, back near the beginning of Eagle, Rosemarie Seale had gone into West’s office and asked him, “Is it going to be a good machine?” West said: “Yes, Rosemarie. It’s going to be good.”
“It doesn’t matter how hard you work on something,” says Holberger. “What counts is finishing and having it work.”
Like everyone else in the group, he feels what Holberger calls “the peer pressure,” which leads to an absolute determination not to be the one who fails.
It’s not the most elegant approach, but sometimes there is no elegant approach.
Some may have tired of the competition within the group, of what Ken Holberger called the peer pressure: “If I screw up this, then I’ll be the only one, and I’m not gonna be the only one.”
“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 always loved computers. All of a sudden I just didn’t care. It was, all of a sudden, a job.”
He hurries to his cubicle and turns on his terminal, which is hooked up to the Eclipse called Woodstock. But a message appears on his screen saying that the program will not run, he’ll have to wait—too many other engineers are using Woodstock now. But Holberger can’t wait. So through his terminal he broadcasts an EMERGENCY WARNING MESSAGE. Throughout the basement, on every screen of every terminal using Woodstock at the moment, this message now appears. It says, in effect, “Shut down your terminal at once because the system is crashing.” From his terminal Holberger can watch the various
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Another story made the rounds: that in turning down a suggestion that the group buy a new logic analyzer, West once said, “An analyzer costs ten thousand dollars. Overtime for engineers is free.”
Some didn’t hold to the attitude at all. “No, I think about it a lot,” Chuck Holland told me. “Initially, when I was starting out, I could have worked for a company that makes machines directly for the military, and for more money. But I’m not gonna design anything that directly bombs someone.”
IN AUGUST, Carl Carman asked Ed Rasala when he thought they would finish the debugging. Rasala looked squarely at his division’s vice president and said, “I don’t know.” West was greatly amused.
“It’s just bullshit,” said Jon Blau in a loud voice one evening around this time while sitting by Coke. “What’s better, Crest or Colgate?”
Of anything that clearly wasn’t going to get done on time, they would say, “No sweat, we’ll do it in five weeks.”
it turned out, the group did not get much new space. Alsing and Rasala got walls and a real door apiece, and most of the rest got cubicles again—but ones of slightly different size, so that an engineer with some seniority, such as Holberger, got several square feet more than the recruits. Thus, for the first time, the group’s pecking order was made completely visible. It was carved out in steel partitions.
But, truly, the Hardy Boys had arrived at the state in which they could feel what was wrong with their machine.
Danger made life interesting, but anxiety gets tiring after a while.
