My dad was Tom West from Soul of a New Machine. Tracy Kidder lived at our house on weekends in the late 1970s while he was working on this book. He and my dad remained friends for the rest of his life, going out on boats, drinking a lot, talking about big ideas. Tom and Tracy and (Richard) Todd were the guys, when I was a girl. I wasn't as in touch with Tracy but I'd see him at events sometimes, I had a Tracy Kidder website up before he had his own website. He came to my father's memorial service in 2011, talked about the doors that book had opened up, how his life was changed by being able to tell that story as he's been able to tell so many people's stories since then. "I know the book was good for me," he said, "but I was never quite sure if it was good for Tom."
My favorite little bit of content about SOANM, and Tracy, is attached to this 2013 blog post.
It's a 1983 report from The Computer Museum (Inside "The Soul of a New Machine" Tracy Kidder and Tom West) which contains the partial transcript of an event that Tracy and Tom did together, that I don't think they did again. When Tracy was asked what he was up to and if he was sick of computers, he said
"I'm digging out from under. I'm writing some articles about atmospheric research. To be honest, I'm a little tired of my book. I put it on my shelf and
won't read it again for years. I think I know what's wrong with it. In some
sense, writing a book is like building a computer. There are rewards but one of
the main ones is that Sisyphean one that if you do one you get to do another. So, I have an opportunity now to write a better one." And he did, he wrote so many books that were, if not better, at least just as good.
I commented once before to you here on hackernews but this book, and the story of your dad, influenced my entire career as an electrical engineer and software developer (class of 1988, I think we were asked to read the book, and its still here on the shelf today). It helped me keep a good perspective on my career over all these years.
I am honored and humbled to be able to say this to you, so many years later.
Thanks for sharing this, and especially the "So What" from the professor. I guess a lot of the engineers (described in the book) did feel "So What" at the end of a big project, especially one as grinding as the Eagle, but they probably found some answers when working on it -- and that's why I, as a wanna-be engineer, really enjoyed the analogy of "pinball" -- that's probably the best analogy I could find for engineers.
The Soul of a New Machine really grabbed me in college. Tracy Kidder wrote with a unique style that (to me) really drives the narrative forward while making you stop and consider the forces behind the story he's telling. The characters he writes about are real people and they seem like it.
Moutains Beyond Mountains[1], another book by Kidder, is even more compelling to me. It's a fascinating story of Paul Farmer, who dedicated his life to fighting infectious disease, especially in Haiti.
Mountains Beyond Mountains was an incredible recruiting tool for health equity work, inspiring a huge number of people (including my partner) to try to follow in Paul Farmer's footsteps.
(Farmer himself died a few years ago, at only 62, of a sudden heart attack in his sleep, but he seems to have put in about 100 lifetimes worth of work. One wonders if his legendary overwork contributed to an early death.)
Virtually everybody I knew in the US Peace Corps had read and been inspired by Mountains Beyond Mountains. It's safe to say it'd been a strong nudge in that direction for many.
Mountains Beyond Mountains is a pantheon read for me.
Farmer grew up incredibly poor, got into Duke and Harvard, had opportunities to make incredible money and traded it for a life of providing medical care to the third world on a shoestring budget while schooling organizations like the WHO on how to provide care along the way.
Agreed. Farmer's O for the P (provide a preferential option for the poor in health care) was clearly central to his life. I think about it often.
On top of that he was incredibly competent at navigating the combination of hostile bureaucracy, apathy, and disorganization. It's incredible what he and PIH accomplished.
He always spoke more about "Mountains Beyond Mountains" than his other works, I think because of what he had to endure to write it. It caused him severe illness and health problems due to the locations he had to go to.
My favorite was actually the one about the carpenters/house builders (forget the name of it, I need to dig it out of some box in the garage and read it again)
Yeah, I bought that and SoaNM as a pair because my parents had copies back in the day. Never regretted it and went on to read everything he wrote. Will miss the opportunity to dive into some subject I know little to nothing about with him.
I don't know if I liked it more then Soul Of A New Machine but for some reason House stuck with me. I remember a bit that talked about building to a "good and workmanlike manner." It's funny the stuff that sticks with you.
I read the book when it first came out. In 1986 I took a job at a new company and Carl Alsing, who was the manager of the microkids (and had written every bit of microcode for machines that came before that) was in the office next to my cube. In fact, he was one of the people who interviewed me for the job.
So I reread the book and my esteem for Kidder's writing went up even more. In the parts of the book where he described Alsing's appearance and demeanor were spot on and captured essential things about Alsing without using a lot of words.
One of the things I recall is Kidder said something like, "Alsing is a tall man, but his mild demeanor and hunched posture presents a much less imposing figure." Sure enough, that is exactly the experience I had with Carl.
I think my only crossing of paths with someone from Data General was actually only a few years ago. A startup was building cutting-edge phototonic computing tech for AI, and one of the key people for the electronic hardware side was a graybeard from DG. Nice mild-mannered guy, and very capable and sensible. I recall a major tapeout working the first time.
(They also had an engineering executive who had been a computer engineer from a major CPU company. In one engineering reporting meeting, when a team mentioned they needed to do something with a particular facility of the off-the-shelf CPU, the executive volunteered that he could help with that, since he designed it. Everyone laughed.)
Hardware companies are a mixed blessing for us software people, but I wonder whether hardware engineers are more likely to keep it real (old-school high-powered engineer style) than software people?
I too had a crossing of paths with one of the micro kids. She was descibed in the book as the lone female engineer on the team. She is a very sharp and talented individual and was a pleasure to work with.
It is not at all surprising that “The Soul of a New Machine” resonates with people in Hacker News. And it is a tremendous book. But for me, his book about Paul Farmer, “Mountains Beyond Mountains”, was even more meaningful. Tracy met Paul by happenstance and in a short encounter recognized the stubborn greatness that was Paul. He was an amazing character who sadly is no longer with us, but captured in a book worthy of his life. Read the book and contribute to Paul’s life work “Partners in Health”.
House was also a wonderful read. In many ways I enjoyed it more than SoaNM due to the parallels with software development but in a completely different domain. Building a house is remarkably similar to building an application.
His whole catalogue is fantastic really. Definitely a favourite author of mine.
Agreed. The Soul of a New Machine is my personal favorite but I think Mountains Beyond Mountains as well as Strength in What Remains are the more powerful and interesting books.
Kind of amazing that that book was written in 2003. Farmer would've only been about 42 around then and he'd already done so much that Kidder wrote this book about him.
_The Soul of a New Machine_ was one of the first (among many!) tech history books I read as a precocious teen, when I hadn't even seen a VAX (or a miniframe), let alone programmed one. But the book brought alive the machine right in front of my eyes. This was years ago, when the only thing I programmed was a piddly DOS system with BASIC.
His one quote [1] remained in my imagination, and inspired me to learn management.
Context: Tom West and his team have acquired a VAX system from DEC, and are reverse-engineering it to see how it is setup.
"...Looking into the VAX, [Tom] West felt he saw the diagram of DEC's corporate organization. He found the VAX 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. The machine expressed DEC's cautious, bureaucratic style. [West was pleased with this idea.]..."
It inspired me to become a better manager precisely because I was tearing down bureaucracies in my own work.
Every now and then when I mull over product failures (or successes), I see the product architectures reflect the organizational messes they are born in.
I think I read a condensed version of "Soul of a New Machine" in a Reader's Digest when I was 10 or 11, and I wanted to become a CPU developer afterwards. Well, I still read every article about CPU microarchitectures that I can find.
Software products (which is where I spent most of my career) absolutely reflects the org that built it...
It had almost become my hobby to do a reverse-mapping of sorts and understand an org that built some software - and with it, all the org's dysfunctions would become obvious, based largely on how the various modules communicate with each other.
Have seen that in numerous autonomous vehicle stacks (among other SW) I've worked with :-/
My favorite story from the book. Working on hardware, the engineers would often have problems where the whole machine would crash because some signal happend one nanosecond too early or one microsecond too late.
Eventually one of the engineers broke. He left and never came back. He left a note on his desk reading "I am going to live on a farm in Vermont, and I will no longer deal with any unit of time shorter than a season."
That engineer didn't give up for very long, he designed a different 32-bit machine for Computervision fairly soon after, it is featured in the AMD PAL book from the early 80s.
I read it from a newspaper, or a magazine that the said engineer clarified that the reason given in the book is inaccurate. I couldn't find it right now, but the gist is: "I had different ideas with my manager, and the other company offered me a chance to lead the design of a new computer.".
Its one of the books I include in my 'desk library' at the office.. I'm an old graybeard, but it's an amazing book for folks to understand the joy and shortcommings and pressures a project can put on you
I hoovered up all the hardcover copies I could and for many years gave them as gifts to my teammates after our projects shipped. Mostly as thanks for a job well done, and just a tiny bit as an apology for what they'd just been through.
Did your team work similar jobs as described in the book? That must be fantastic! Yeah I know most of work is 80% chore, but at least the other 20% part is fantastic.
I read this as a kid, and found it both exciting in some ways, and miserable in others, which was formative.
At age 21 (and accomplished, since I'd started working in my teens), I mentioned the book to my girlfriend, who was getting into software. As a serious English major, she immediately went and closely read the whole thing. I stupidly hadn't realized that of course she was going to that. And I'd neglected to mention that parts of it are a frustrating slog, as the reader suffers along with the characters/subjects. As a reader with empathy, she came out of the book fatigued and somber.
(But she'd said "an artist needs a craft", so she stuck with the field, was very successful, retired early, and has a second/third career doing something brilliant but much less lucrative.)
Despite learnings from the book and experience, I've had a few such unpleasant project slogs. But more projects that I was able to help make non-unpleasant, because I could anticipate and avert some of the problems.
I think the book probably contributed to my tendency to commit seriously to projects. That's been good and bad. It's good, in that you can learn and do things that you otherwise couldn't. It's bad in that it takes you longer to understand that other people are not you, and the ways that they aren't as committed to the project.
Many/most people are about putting in their hours with some standard of professionalism, such as satisfying whatever metrics (e.g., Jira tickets, sprint tasks, KPIs, OKRs, bonus/promotion criteria) they're told are their job. Those, you can work with, once you know that's their mode. You can also try to improve the company incentives that determine outcomes.
(But occasionally you'll encounter people who are misaligned with project/team/company success in a way you can't find common ground with. You have to recognize that hopelessly toxic situation before it's too late, and get them out of the way of the team of aligned people.)
This book of Tracy Kidder told the story of some early computer industry engineers doing something great, through brains, effort, and perseverance -- and that's a great accomplishment for a book. But an additional accomplishment I think was that a lot of us kids who read it then signed up to "play pinball", with an informed idea of what we were sometimes getting ourselves into, and we signed up anyway.
I both read the Soul of a New Machine book and used the Data General MV8000 hardware depicted there - a purchase of DEC VAX machines was being considered, but meanwhile an MV8000 and a bunch of blue and white terminals snuck in ...
The hardware was pretty solid, although I'm not sure anyone got around to doing custom microcode that was a selling point. The operating system (AOS/VS, was it?) was OK, but had some edge cases - I remember the filesystem had ACLs (access control lists), but you could create files owned by non-existent users (promptly used for a prank).
I love the book. We had an Eclipse MV/8000 at college. And abused the hell out of it - when one of my classmates compiled their ADA programs we knew to take a coffee break.
But I can't help but think that the book helped normalize death-marches in the industry. I'm still recommending it to colleagues, but with the caveat that we are not in a "do or die" situation, so go home and get some good sleep.
When I read the book as a teenager, I was awed by the technical achievement of the team.
When I re-read the book ten or fifteen years later as an adult facing burnout, I was awed again – by the human cost of the project. Grim stuff.
Fantastic book, but it bothers me that technologists who talk about it almost universally want to talk about the product, and often don't even notice how well the book depicts a real meat grinder of a process. Kidder was not a technologist, and I think that gave him a wonderful ability to really see everything that was happening around him, and to not simply fixate on the computer they were building.
Nowadays I think grinding is just a big part of the project. Like the ancient Chinese wisdom that says half of the road is the first 90% and the other half is the last 10%. I guess by saying grinding you also meant 1) how the engineers were treated, and 2) how quickly they were burnt out, which I agree, but I really like the pinball analogy, and I believe most people feel that way, is because they never got the chance to really play pinball -- they just play games they don't enjoy, so when they read the books they say "Oh those guys' lives really suck".
He was extremely proud of the other work he did, like "Mountains Beyond Mountains," but I'll always remember the bookcase where he kept every edition of "The Soul of a New Machine" in every language it was printed in. I think seeing that his work was worth being translated into so many languages was for him the biggest achievement of all.
I love _The Soul Of A New Machine_. It was one of the books that got me started loving computer history (the other being Steven Levy's _Hackers,_ which I read afterward). A truly great writer.
A book certainly worth reading for anyone who hasn't. It's interesting to see how little common (modern) project and management pitfalls and tricks have changed in 50 years!
Found this book in a little free library a few months ago and read it cover-to-cover in one night. It's crazy what Data General was able to accomplish with its little side project.
Fun fact: Data General was purchased by EMC, which used the name until 2012.
Me and a couple of friends read “The Soul of a New Machine” in our teens and it was a very influential book for us. In the late 90's I found a brand new hardcover copy of the local translation in a discount bookstore and bought it with the intention of giving it as a present to one of those friends sometime later in life.
I ended up keeping the book for ~25 years and only at the time of his 50th birthday a few years ago I reckoned we're old enough now. I read the book once more and shipped it to him, literally halfway across the world. Great memories. Thank you for your work, Mr. Kidder.
I kept a copy of the book at hand and read it from time to time whenever I need a boost of morale. It is very inspiring -- although the reality was probably more gruesome and less glorious. I keep roleplaying the roles in the books in my side projects, to a certain degree. Fake it until make it, they said so.
Another great book of his is House, which chronicles the building of a house for a young couple somewhere in New England, complete with character sketches of the architects, workers, and customers involved. His ability to portray people in a way that is both sympathetic and clear-minded feels sadly rare to me. Nobody in that book is the hero, and some of their flaws are right there on the pages, but they all seem like people that it would be nice to get to know.
I was late to the party and only read “The Soul of a New Machine” in 2024. It's a great book I think anyone involved in engineering of any kind should give it a read.
It's an especially impressive feat of writing given that it remains accessible and interesting even to people outside of the field. It's a testament to the amount of time he spent essentially embedded with the people at Data General learning about their work and about who they were.
His book amazed me when it was published because I never heard of anyone writing a non-textbook about our field. I thought how cool it would be to work for a company so interesting that someone would write a book about it. Subsequently I worked for two. (Actually four, but two of them at a time long after the books were written).
Something many may not know is that beyond his own novels, Tracy was also deeply involved in Jonathan Harr's book, "A Civil Action." He and Harr were friends, and he told Harr about the courtroom case. Later, when Harr would get stuck, he worked with Harr to edit and give feedback on his drafts.
I've enjoyed his stuff so much that anything with his name on it is a purchase. That let me find this piece in Granta on nursing homes: https://granta.com/the-last-place-on-earth/
When I read SoaNM, I quickly realized that it had been used as a style guide for several later books, and most long-form tech articles in Wired, the NYT, etc.
Soul of a New Machine was one of the first books that got me interested in the tech industry, computers, etc. Reading it as a teen probably contributed substantially to the direction of my career up to the present day.
I would second the black bar for Kidder -- The Soul of a New Machine constitutes the literary foundation of our craft: it is our Odyssey. Speaking personally, I have spoken and written about Soul many times ([0][1][2]) -- and I know that its impact from me is far from unique.
RIP Tracy Kidder -- and thank you for giving us all permission to feel passion for the machine.
Very sad to hear. As an already-addicted computer nerd when The Soul of a New Machine came out, his book put me inside an utterly fascinating alternate world, a world where brilliant people fought incomprehensible difficulties to create the hardware that made my software come to life. Better yet, he brought those people, not just their machines, to life. Still one of my favorite books.
My dad was Tom West from Soul of a New Machine. Tracy Kidder lived at our house on weekends in the late 1970s while he was working on this book. He and my dad remained friends for the rest of his life, going out on boats, drinking a lot, talking about big ideas. Tom and Tracy and (Richard) Todd were the guys, when I was a girl. I wasn't as in touch with Tracy but I'd see him at events sometimes, I had a Tracy Kidder website up before he had his own website. He came to my father's memorial service in 2011, talked about the doors that book had opened up, how his life was changed by being able to tell that story as he's been able to tell so many people's stories since then. "I know the book was good for me," he said, "but I was never quite sure if it was good for Tom."
My favorite little bit of content about SOANM, and Tracy, is attached to this 2013 blog post.
https://tispaquin.blogspot.com/2010/12/1982-interview-with-t...
It's a 1983 report from The Computer Museum (Inside "The Soul of a New Machine" Tracy Kidder and Tom West) which contains the partial transcript of an event that Tracy and Tom did together, that I don't think they did again. When Tracy was asked what he was up to and if he was sick of computers, he said
"I'm digging out from under. I'm writing some articles about atmospheric research. To be honest, I'm a little tired of my book. I put it on my shelf and won't read it again for years. I think I know what's wrong with it. In some sense, writing a book is like building a computer. There are rewards but one of the main ones is that Sisyphean one that if you do one you get to do another. So, I have an opportunity now to write a better one." And he did, he wrote so many books that were, if not better, at least just as good.
I commented once before to you here on hackernews but this book, and the story of your dad, influenced my entire career as an electrical engineer and software developer (class of 1988, I think we were asked to read the book, and its still here on the shelf today). It helped me keep a good perspective on my career over all these years.
I am honored and humbled to be able to say this to you, so many years later.
Thanks for sharing this, and especially the "So What" from the professor. I guess a lot of the engineers (described in the book) did feel "So What" at the end of a big project, especially one as grinding as the Eagle, but they probably found some answers when working on it -- and that's why I, as a wanna-be engineer, really enjoyed the analogy of "pinball" -- that's probably the best analogy I could find for engineers.
Thank you for sharing. And I'm very sorry for your loss.
Thank you for your service. A lot is owed to Tracy and your father.
This is one of the reasons why I like this site so much.
Thanks for sharing. The Soul remains my favourite book. And sorry for your loss.
The Soul of a New Machine really grabbed me in college. Tracy Kidder wrote with a unique style that (to me) really drives the narrative forward while making you stop and consider the forces behind the story he's telling. The characters he writes about are real people and they seem like it.
Moutains Beyond Mountains[1], another book by Kidder, is even more compelling to me. It's a fascinating story of Paul Farmer, who dedicated his life to fighting infectious disease, especially in Haiti.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountains_Beyond_Mountains
Mountains Beyond Mountains was an incredible recruiting tool for health equity work, inspiring a huge number of people (including my partner) to try to follow in Paul Farmer's footsteps.
(Farmer himself died a few years ago, at only 62, of a sudden heart attack in his sleep, but he seems to have put in about 100 lifetimes worth of work. One wonders if his legendary overwork contributed to an early death.)
Virtually everybody I knew in the US Peace Corps had read and been inspired by Mountains Beyond Mountains. It's safe to say it'd been a strong nudge in that direction for many.
Mountains Beyond Mountains is a pantheon read for me.
Farmer grew up incredibly poor, got into Duke and Harvard, had opportunities to make incredible money and traded it for a life of providing medical care to the third world on a shoestring budget while schooling organizations like the WHO on how to provide care along the way.
Truly one of one.
Agreed. Farmer's O for the P (provide a preferential option for the poor in health care) was clearly central to his life. I think about it often.
On top of that he was incredibly competent at navigating the combination of hostile bureaucracy, apathy, and disorganization. It's incredible what he and PIH accomplished.
He always spoke more about "Mountains Beyond Mountains" than his other works, I think because of what he had to endure to write it. It caused him severe illness and health problems due to the locations he had to go to.
My favorite was actually the one about the carpenters/house builders (forget the name of it, I need to dig it out of some box in the garage and read it again)
Yeah, I bought that and SoaNM as a pair because my parents had copies back in the day. Never regretted it and went on to read everything he wrote. Will miss the opportunity to dive into some subject I know little to nothing about with him.
That book is just called House, although I always confuse the title with J. D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.
Hah, I should have remembered that title. Just ordered the Truck Full of Money book. I hadn't really kept track of his later works.
I don't know if I liked it more then Soul Of A New Machine but for some reason House stuck with me. I remember a bit that talked about building to a "good and workmanlike manner." It's funny the stuff that sticks with you.
I read the book when it first came out. In 1986 I took a job at a new company and Carl Alsing, who was the manager of the microkids (and had written every bit of microcode for machines that came before that) was in the office next to my cube. In fact, he was one of the people who interviewed me for the job.
So I reread the book and my esteem for Kidder's writing went up even more. In the parts of the book where he described Alsing's appearance and demeanor were spot on and captured essential things about Alsing without using a lot of words.
One of the things I recall is Kidder said something like, "Alsing is a tall man, but his mild demeanor and hunched posture presents a much less imposing figure." Sure enough, that is exactly the experience I had with Carl.
I think my only crossing of paths with someone from Data General was actually only a few years ago. A startup was building cutting-edge phototonic computing tech for AI, and one of the key people for the electronic hardware side was a graybeard from DG. Nice mild-mannered guy, and very capable and sensible. I recall a major tapeout working the first time.
(They also had an engineering executive who had been a computer engineer from a major CPU company. In one engineering reporting meeting, when a team mentioned they needed to do something with a particular facility of the off-the-shelf CPU, the executive volunteered that he could help with that, since he designed it. Everyone laughed.)
Hardware companies are a mixed blessing for us software people, but I wonder whether hardware engineers are more likely to keep it real (old-school high-powered engineer style) than software people?
I too had a crossing of paths with one of the micro kids. She was descibed in the book as the lone female engineer on the team. She is a very sharp and talented individual and was a pleasure to work with.
It is not at all surprising that “The Soul of a New Machine” resonates with people in Hacker News. And it is a tremendous book. But for me, his book about Paul Farmer, “Mountains Beyond Mountains”, was even more meaningful. Tracy met Paul by happenstance and in a short encounter recognized the stubborn greatness that was Paul. He was an amazing character who sadly is no longer with us, but captured in a book worthy of his life. Read the book and contribute to Paul’s life work “Partners in Health”.
House was also a wonderful read. In many ways I enjoyed it more than SoaNM due to the parallels with software development but in a completely different domain. Building a house is remarkably similar to building an application.
His whole catalogue is fantastic really. Definitely a favourite author of mine.
Agreed. The Soul of a New Machine is my personal favorite but I think Mountains Beyond Mountains as well as Strength in What Remains are the more powerful and interesting books.
Kind of amazing that that book was written in 2003. Farmer would've only been about 42 around then and he'd already done so much that Kidder wrote this book about him.
_The Soul of a New Machine_ was one of the first (among many!) tech history books I read as a precocious teen, when I hadn't even seen a VAX (or a miniframe), let alone programmed one. But the book brought alive the machine right in front of my eyes. This was years ago, when the only thing I programmed was a piddly DOS system with BASIC.
His one quote [1] remained in my imagination, and inspired me to learn management. Context: Tom West and his team have acquired a VAX system from DEC, and are reverse-engineering it to see how it is setup.
"...Looking into the VAX, [Tom] West felt he saw the diagram of DEC's corporate organization. He found the VAX 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. The machine expressed DEC's cautious, bureaucratic style. [West was pleased with this idea.]..."
It inspired me to become a better manager precisely because I was tearing down bureaucracies in my own work.
Every now and then when I mull over product failures (or successes), I see the product architectures reflect the organizational messes they are born in.
RIP Tracy Kidder.
[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/882178766/Tracy-Kidder-Flyin...
I think I read a condensed version of "Soul of a New Machine" in a Reader's Digest when I was 10 or 11, and I wanted to become a CPU developer afterwards. Well, I still read every article about CPU microarchitectures that I can find.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
Applies both to software as well as hardware.
Oh, absolutely.
Software products (which is where I spent most of my career) absolutely reflects the org that built it...
It had almost become my hobby to do a reverse-mapping of sorts and understand an org that built some software - and with it, all the org's dysfunctions would become obvious, based largely on how the various modules communicate with each other.
Have seen that in numerous autonomous vehicle stacks (among other SW) I've worked with :-/
My favorite story from the book. Working on hardware, the engineers would often have problems where the whole machine would crash because some signal happend one nanosecond too early or one microsecond too late.
Eventually one of the engineers broke. He left and never came back. He left a note on his desk reading "I am going to live on a farm in Vermont, and I will no longer deal with any unit of time shorter than a season."
That engineer didn't give up for very long, he designed a different 32-bit machine for Computervision fairly soon after, it is featured in the AMD PAL book from the early 80s.
indeed: B. Joshua Rosen https://www.polybus.com/hdlmaker/Resume.html
I read it from a newspaper, or a magazine that the said engineer clarified that the reason given in the book is inaccurate. I couldn't find it right now, but the gist is: "I had different ideas with my manager, and the other company offered me a chance to lead the design of a new computer.".
Its one of the books I include in my 'desk library' at the office.. I'm an old graybeard, but it's an amazing book for folks to understand the joy and shortcommings and pressures a project can put on you
I hoovered up all the hardcover copies I could and for many years gave them as gifts to my teammates after our projects shipped. Mostly as thanks for a job well done, and just a tiny bit as an apology for what they'd just been through.
Did your team work similar jobs as described in the book? That must be fantastic! Yeah I know most of work is 80% chore, but at least the other 20% part is fantastic.
Entirely software, far above the Hardy Boys and Microkids in the stack. But the general pace and pressure of the story are still relatable.
I got the same vibes, by the way, from Season One of Halt and Catch Fire (recently and deservedly discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314).
I can't confirm it, but I think a few of the scenes from Halt and Catch Fire come from Soul of a New Machine.
Thanks for sharing!
I read this as a kid, and found it both exciting in some ways, and miserable in others, which was formative.
At age 21 (and accomplished, since I'd started working in my teens), I mentioned the book to my girlfriend, who was getting into software. As a serious English major, she immediately went and closely read the whole thing. I stupidly hadn't realized that of course she was going to that. And I'd neglected to mention that parts of it are a frustrating slog, as the reader suffers along with the characters/subjects. As a reader with empathy, she came out of the book fatigued and somber.
(But she'd said "an artist needs a craft", so she stuck with the field, was very successful, retired early, and has a second/third career doing something brilliant but much less lucrative.)
Despite learnings from the book and experience, I've had a few such unpleasant project slogs. But more projects that I was able to help make non-unpleasant, because I could anticipate and avert some of the problems.
I think the book probably contributed to my tendency to commit seriously to projects. That's been good and bad. It's good, in that you can learn and do things that you otherwise couldn't. It's bad in that it takes you longer to understand that other people are not you, and the ways that they aren't as committed to the project.
Many/most people are about putting in their hours with some standard of professionalism, such as satisfying whatever metrics (e.g., Jira tickets, sprint tasks, KPIs, OKRs, bonus/promotion criteria) they're told are their job. Those, you can work with, once you know that's their mode. You can also try to improve the company incentives that determine outcomes.
(But occasionally you'll encounter people who are misaligned with project/team/company success in a way you can't find common ground with. You have to recognize that hopelessly toxic situation before it's too late, and get them out of the way of the team of aligned people.)
This book of Tracy Kidder told the story of some early computer industry engineers doing something great, through brains, effort, and perseverance -- and that's a great accomplishment for a book. But an additional accomplishment I think was that a lot of us kids who read it then signed up to "play pinball", with an informed idea of what we were sometimes getting ourselves into, and we signed up anyway.
I both read the Soul of a New Machine book and used the Data General MV8000 hardware depicted there - a purchase of DEC VAX machines was being considered, but meanwhile an MV8000 and a bunch of blue and white terminals snuck in ...
The hardware was pretty solid, although I'm not sure anyone got around to doing custom microcode that was a selling point. The operating system (AOS/VS, was it?) was OK, but had some edge cases - I remember the filesystem had ACLs (access control lists), but you could create files owned by non-existent users (promptly used for a prank).
Thanks for the tale, it made a dent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Kidder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL20167A
https://www.tracykidder.com/
I love the book. We had an Eclipse MV/8000 at college. And abused the hell out of it - when one of my classmates compiled their ADA programs we knew to take a coffee break.
But I can't help but think that the book helped normalize death-marches in the industry. I'm still recommending it to colleagues, but with the caveat that we are not in a "do or die" situation, so go home and get some good sleep.
When I read the book as a teenager, I was awed by the technical achievement of the team.
When I re-read the book ten or fifteen years later as an adult facing burnout, I was awed again – by the human cost of the project. Grim stuff.
Fantastic book, but it bothers me that technologists who talk about it almost universally want to talk about the product, and often don't even notice how well the book depicts a real meat grinder of a process. Kidder was not a technologist, and I think that gave him a wonderful ability to really see everything that was happening around him, and to not simply fixate on the computer they were building.
Nowadays I think grinding is just a big part of the project. Like the ancient Chinese wisdom that says half of the road is the first 90% and the other half is the last 10%. I guess by saying grinding you also meant 1) how the engineers were treated, and 2) how quickly they were burnt out, which I agree, but I really like the pinball analogy, and I believe most people feel that way, is because they never got the chance to really play pinball -- they just play games they don't enjoy, so when they read the books they say "Oh those guys' lives really suck".
He was extremely proud of the other work he did, like "Mountains Beyond Mountains," but I'll always remember the bookcase where he kept every edition of "The Soul of a New Machine" in every language it was printed in. I think seeing that his work was worth being translated into so many languages was for him the biggest achievement of all.
I love _The Soul Of A New Machine_. It was one of the books that got me started loving computer history (the other being Steven Levy's _Hackers,_ which I read afterward). A truly great writer.
A book certainly worth reading for anyone who hasn't. It's interesting to see how little common (modern) project and management pitfalls and tricks have changed in 50 years!
https://archive.ph/2026.03.25-161254/https://www.nytimes.com...
Found this book in a little free library a few months ago and read it cover-to-cover in one night. It's crazy what Data General was able to accomplish with its little side project.
Fun fact: Data General was purchased by EMC, which used the name until 2012.
Their old internet domain, dg.com, was sold to Dollar General in 2009.
Me and a couple of friends read “The Soul of a New Machine” in our teens and it was a very influential book for us. In the late 90's I found a brand new hardcover copy of the local translation in a discount bookstore and bought it with the intention of giving it as a present to one of those friends sometime later in life.
I ended up keeping the book for ~25 years and only at the time of his 50th birthday a few years ago I reckoned we're old enough now. I read the book once more and shipped it to him, literally halfway across the world. Great memories. Thank you for your work, Mr. Kidder.
In case it's not clear, 'Halt and Catch Fire' was more or less based on Kidder's Pulitzer-winning 'Soul of a New Machine'.
RIP.
I kept a copy of the book at hand and read it from time to time whenever I need a boost of morale. It is very inspiring -- although the reality was probably more gruesome and less glorious. I keep roleplaying the roles in the books in my side projects, to a certain degree. Fake it until make it, they said so.
Another great book of his is House, which chronicles the building of a house for a young couple somewhere in New England, complete with character sketches of the architects, workers, and customers involved. His ability to portray people in a way that is both sympathetic and clear-minded feels sadly rare to me. Nobody in that book is the hero, and some of their flaws are right there on the pages, but they all seem like people that it would be nice to get to know.
RIP Tracy.
I was late to the party and only read “The Soul of a New Machine” in 2024. It's a great book I think anyone involved in engineering of any kind should give it a read.
It's an especially impressive feat of writing given that it remains accessible and interesting even to people outside of the field. It's a testament to the amount of time he spent essentially embedded with the people at Data General learning about their work and about who they were.
His book amazed me when it was published because I never heard of anyone writing a non-textbook about our field. I thought how cool it would be to work for a company so interesting that someone would write a book about it. Subsequently I worked for two. (Actually four, but two of them at a time long after the books were written).
Something many may not know is that beyond his own novels, Tracy was also deeply involved in Jonathan Harr's book, "A Civil Action." He and Harr were friends, and he told Harr about the courtroom case. Later, when Harr would get stuck, he worked with Harr to edit and give feedback on his drafts.
I've enjoyed his stuff so much that anything with his name on it is a purchase. That let me find this piece in Granta on nursing homes: https://granta.com/the-last-place-on-earth/
I know Bryan Cantrill was a fan - I bought her book because of his talks.
> I bought her book because of his talks.
Same!
OK, but Tracy Kidder was a dude.
OH! Thanks. Just googled..him. You just completely floored me!
When I read SoaNM, I quickly realized that it had been used as a style guide for several later books, and most long-form tech articles in Wired, the NYT, etc.
I found this book in a $2 bin at one of my (now long gone) used bookstores. It was a fantastic read. Thank you Mr Kidder for the fantastic story.
:-( I'm going to dig out my copy and read it next month.
Soul of a New Machine was one of the first books that got me interested in the tech industry, computers, etc. Reading it as a teen probably contributed substantially to the direction of my career up to the present day.
RIP Mr. Kidder.
Black bar?
I would second the black bar for Kidder -- The Soul of a New Machine constitutes the literary foundation of our craft: it is our Odyssey. Speaking personally, I have spoken and written about Soul many times ([0][1][2]) -- and I know that its impact from me is far from unique.
RIP Tracy Kidder -- and thank you for giving us all permission to feel passion for the machine.
[0] https://speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/oral-tradition-in-software...
[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/02/10/reflecting-on-the-so...
[2] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...
Very sad to hear. As an already-addicted computer nerd when The Soul of a New Machine came out, his book put me inside an utterly fascinating alternate world, a world where brilliant people fought incomprehensible difficulties to create the hardware that made my software come to life. Better yet, he brought those people, not just their machines, to life. Still one of my favorite books.
Another of his books is A Truck Full of Money: One Man's Quest to Recover from Great Success, about Paul English, founder of Kayak.
https://www.tracykidder.com/a-truck-full-of-money.html