The Soul of A New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

But the animal in there isn’t stuffed; the computer is functioning, lights on it softly blinking as it produces on the screen beside it a series of graphs—ten

IBM, one executive of a mainframe company once said, represented not competition but “the environment,” and on Wall Street and elsewhere some people made a business solely out of attempting to predict what the environment would do next.

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.

At the top of the chapter about the instruction set, for instance, he placed this quote from Macbeth: We still have judgement here; that we but teach Bloody Instructions [Wallach’s cap.], which, being taught, return To plague the inventor.

Alsing felt that they were missing something. He remembered learning assembly language during his time of midnight programming. “It was neat to learn it. I could skip the middleman and talk right to the machine. It was also great for me to learn that priestly language. I could talk to God, just like IBM.”

Coming from the fair, it seemed to me that computers have been used in ways that are salutary, in ways that are dangerous, banal and cruel, and in ways that seem harmless if a little silly. But what fun making them can be!