The Soul of A New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

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

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).

It became apparent that communications and computing served each other so intimately that they might actually become the same thing;

PDP-8. DEC sent this machine to market in 1965. It was a hit. It made DEC’s first fortune. The PDP-8, says the official history, “established the concept of minicomputers, leading the way to a multibillion dollar industry.” But the book doesn’t say that Edson de Castro, then an engineer in his twenties, led the team that designed the PDP-8.

Because if you’re going to make a small inexpensive computer you have to sell a lot of them to make a lot of money. And we intend to make a lot of money.

Where did the risks lie? Where could a company go badly wrong? In many cases, a small and daily growing computer company did not fall on hard times because people suddenly stopped wanting to buy its products. On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxiate on its own success.

By the mid-1960s, a trend that would become increasingly pronounced was already apparent: while the expense of building a computer’s hardware was steadily declining, the cost of creating both user and system software was rising. In an extremely bold stroke, IBM took advantage of the trend. They announced, in the mid-sixties, all at one time, an entire family of new computers—the famous 360 line. In the commerce of computers, no single event has had wider significance, except for the invention of the transistor.

Cray was a legend in computers, and in the movie 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.

There was, it appeared, a mysterious rite of initiation through which, in one way or another, almost every member of the team passed. The term that the old hands used for this rite—West invented the term, not the practice—was “signing up.” By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success. You agreed to forsake, if necessary, family, hobbies, and friends—if you had any of these left (and you might not if you had signed up too many times before). From a manager’s point of view, the practical virtues of the ritual were manifold. Labor was no longer coerced. Labor volunteered. When you signed up you in effect declared, “I want to do this job and I’ll give it my heart and soul.” It cut another way.

“Engineers want to produce something,” said Wallach. “I didn’t go to school for six years just to get a paycheck.

Boolean algebra was something that made perfect sense, and thus it was a rare commodity for him. He called it beautiful.

In a book called Computer Power and Human Reason, a professor of computer science at MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum writes of a malady he calls “the compulsion to program.”

On the Magic Marker board in his office, West wrote the following: Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well.

the managers had probably known something he hadn’t yet learned: that 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.

A time was probably coming when components would operate so quickly that the distance that signals had to travel would intimately affect the speed of most commercial computers. Then miniaturization and speed would become more nearly synonymous.

West would sit at his desk and stare for hours at the team’s drawings of the hardware, playing his own mind games with the results of the other engineers’ mind games. Will this work? How much will this cost? Once, someone brought a crying baby past his door, and afterward it took him an hour to retrace his steps through the circuit design he had been pondering. Laughter outside often had the same effect, and once in a while it made his hands shake with rage—especially if he didn’t like the design he’d been staring at.

West usually drove out of Westborough fast after work. “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.”

It struck him as paradoxical, all this energy and passion, both his own and that of the engineers around him, being expended for a decidedly commercial purpose. But that purpose wasn’t his own. He had enjoyed his years at Raytheon; life had been pleasant there and he had been an easygoing fellow. Now, in the Eclipse Group, for several years in a row he had been working overtime without extra pay in an atmosphere that was decidedly not easygoing. Why had he made the switch to Data General and now signed up to work on Eagle? Rasala said, “I was looking for”—he ticked the items off on his fingers—“opportunity, responsibility, visibility.” What did those words mean to him, though? Rasala shrugged his shoulders. “I wanted to see what I was worth,” he explained.

Rasala himself said: “I’m an implementer. I’m not gonna go out and invent anything. But making it work is fun. It’s something I think I do reasonably well. I don’t have Wallach’s knowledge, I’m not on top of the architecture per se, but I’m a good designer, I think, and I’m a better debugger.”

“I think I wanted to see how complicated things happen,” West said years later. “There’s some notion of control, it seems to me, that you can derive in a world full of confusion if you at least understand how things get put together. Even if you can’t under stand every little part, how infernal machines get put together.”

“The reason why I work is because I win….

“Build something larger than myself. “Among those who chucked the established ways, including me, there’s something awfully compelling about this,” West said of building Eagle. “Some notion of insecurity and challenge, of where the edges are, of finding out what you can’t do, all within a perfectly justifiable scenario. It’s for the kind of guy who likes to climb up mountains.”

You notice this sometimes when talking to him—he’s looking at you and he’s really listening; it makes some people nervous. His managers’ confidence in him is tempered only by their feeling that he works too hard.

“I had a lot of control over the things I did, and the price was a lot of pressure. If I spent only a sixty-hour week, I felt intensely guilty.” He told himself that he was having the time of his life. During his second year at Special Systems, he began to remind himself of this with some regularity. “Josh,” he would say to himself, “you’re designing the sexy machines.” The dialogue with himself continued when he joined the Eclipse Group and began working on Eagle. “You’ve always revered the people who built the NOVA and the PDP-11. Now you’re one of them. You’re the guy you always wanted to be,” he said in his mind. “So why,” he asked himself, “am I not happy?”

West stubbed out his cigarette, lit another, and went back to looking at whatever it was he saw in the ceiling. “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.”

What is usually meant by the term craftsmanship is the production of things of high quality; Ruskin makes the crucial point that a thing may also be judged according to the conditions under which it was built.

“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.”