The Soul of A New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

But computers were relatively scarce, and they were large and very expensive. Typically, one big machine served an entire organization.

Scientists and engineers, it seems, were the first to express a desire for a relatively inexpensive computer that they could operate themselves. The result was a machine called a minicomputer.

Shortly after World War II, decades of investigation into the internal workings of the solids yielded a new piece of electronic hardware called a transistor (for its actual invention, three scientists at Bell Laboratories won the Nobel Prize).

“Money,” he whispered solemnly. “There’s so goddamn much money to be made.”

The PDP-8, says the official history, “established the concept of minicomputers, leading the way to a multibillion dollar industry.”

IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines.

“We’re trying to maximize the win, and make Eagle go as fast as a raped ape.”

Ugh tech bro

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.

“I don’t know,” said Alsing, after it was all done. “It was kind of like recruiting for a suicide mission. You’re gonna die, but you’re gonna die in glory.”

No single instruction in Trixie’s set was equivalent to the “/”. The “/” became a series of several discrete instructions.

A computer in which the stairway ends there, at the level of assembly language, is said to be “hard-wired.” It has circuits especially designed to perform each basic operation in the machine’s instruction set. But by the seventies—again, in most computers—assembly language no longer went directly to the circuits, but was itself translated into another language, called microcode.

Scared, he packed up the necessary circuit diagrams, specs and manuals and went to the Boston Public Library.

It was always this way with Alsing. The summer before the Eagle project began, he was assigned to write the code for a new Eclipse. As usual, he stalled, and when he felt that he was about to get in trouble, he went home with an armful of books.

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

“Writing microcode is like nothing else in my life. For days there’s nothing coming out. The empty yellow pad sits there in front of me, reminding me of my inadequacy. Finally, it starts to come. I feel good. That feeds it, and finally I get into a mental state where I’m a microcode-writing machine. It’s like being in Adventure. Adventure’s a completely bogus world, but when you’re there, you’re there.

“I’ve done this in short intervals for a short period each year. There’s low intensity before it and a letdown at the end. There’s a big section where you come down off it, and sometimes you do it awkwardly and feel a little strange, wobbly and tired, and you want to say to your friends, ‘Hey, I’m back.’

“When a computer engineer gets old, he gets turned out to pasture or else made into dog food.”

Among engineers generally, the most common form of ambition—the one made most socially acceptable—has been the desire to become a manager. If you don’t become one by a certain age, then in the eyes of many of your peers you become a failure.

Booth’s algorithm,

He knows he can solve them, if he’s just given the time. But the managers keep saying, “There’s no time.” Okay. Sure. It’s a rush job. But this is ridiculous. No one seems to be in control; nothing’s ever explained. Foul up, however, and the managers come at you from all sides.

Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well.

The IP has a relatively small memory of its own. In a sense, the IP makes assumptions about what the next instructions in the user program will be, and it keeps those instructions handy in its storage.

“I can’t talk about the machine,” he said one evening, bent forward over the steering wheel. “I’ve gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I’m gonna go mad.”

“I was looking for”—he ticked the items off on his fingers—“opportunity, responsibility, visibility.”

he spoke with evident frustration of engineers who were reluctant to work on boards that someone else had designed, who felt comfortable only when working on their own.

“Our nightmare is that you keep getting faults.”

when he felt he had mastered enough of the jargon to talk a good game, and in a hurry, lest he forget everything that he’d read, he talked his way into a job at RCA.

“Where is it? I’ll take it with me,” snapped West, adding with a look that my wife found a little frightening, “I can fix anything.”

As the years go by, the number of bugs declines, but although no flaws in a computer’s design might appear for years, defects would probably remain in it—ones so small and occurring only under such peculiar circumstances that they might never show up before the machine became obsolete or simply stopped functioning because of dust in its chips.

These were primarily the System Cache and the IP, both of which were designed in order to eliminate the bottleneck between the machine and its storage.

Pre fetching of instructiond and an intermediate cache between the RAM and thr instruction processor IP

“They don’t want us to know how many hours we work. If we did, they’d have to pay us a lot more…. But,” Holberger says, “I don’t work for money.”

Holberger is twenty-six now, and though not exactly on his deathbed, he is curious about what a computer engineer does “afterward.”

Perpetuating ageism in the software industry

“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.”

bubble memory.

Computers had become less noticeable as they had become smaller, more reliable, more efficient, and more numerous. Surely this happened by design. Obviously, to sell the devices far and wide, manufacturers had to strive to make them easy to use and, wherever possible, invisible.

“We don’t know,” said Rasala. “We don’t know everything about the machine.”

Presumably such literature arises because so many jobs have been made so trivial that few people can find any meaning at all in them.