Reading :: The Soul of a New Machine

The Soul of a New Machine

By Tracy Kidder

Just a quick acknowledgement that I finally read this book, which is frequently used to illustrate Latour’s points in Science in Action. Since Latour used it, I was expecting an ethnography, but instead it’s an engaging, fast-paced account of how a team of engineers at Data General designed a superminicomputer (the Eclipse MV/8000) and brought it to market in a remarkably short amount of time. 

This 1981 book is a terrific read, introducing us to different people and different phases of the project, helping us to understand what drives them and how their organization has been set up, and also showing how Data General exploited the spirit and curiosity of these young engineers (mostly early 20s). At one point, an salaried engineer working 80 hours a week discovers the pay stub of a contractor in the wastebasket — and realizes that this hourly contractor, working overtime, is making twice as much as the engineer. After some thought, the engineer and his manager decide to burn the pay stub so that the other engineers won’t see it.

Kidder plays up the Machiavellian machinations of the group’s manager, and I can see how this figure caught Latour’s imagination at that point in his career. But I was also intrigued by the accounts of debugging, which brought back my memories as a computer science student in 1988-1991 (a few years after the events in the book). Although I didn’t work on hardware, I certainly spent many late night sessions, or all nighters, poring over code, tracking down bugs, and figuring out how to do things that (I imagined) no one else had done in quite the same way. So I identified with the engineers and their motivations, even as I wanted to tell them to hold out for better compensation and to work fewer hours. 

The book is definitely a product of its time, and some of the reported statements that seemed colorful or interesting to Kidder ring as blatantly racist and sexist today. For instance, at one point, an engineer walks through a computer expo with Kidder, pointing out how the IBM booth had “just the right number” of women and Blacks. (In contrast, the Data General team had just one woman, and although Kidder doesn’t mention race, he is quick to mention which engineers are Jewish.) So sometimes the book makes uneasy reading. But still fascinating reading. If you want to get a sense of what drove the incredible leaps in computer technology in the late 1970s and early 1980s, definitely pick up this gripping book.