Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

The Soul of a New Machine differs from most other books that have been revisited in Technology and Culture during the past few years, as it was written not by a scholar for other scholars but by a professional writer for a popular audience. The number of popular books—written by authors both inside and outside academe—is on the upswing, as the annual list of submissions for SHOT's Hacker Prize can attest.¹ The genre is certainly not new, however. For many of us, popular works such as The Soul of a New Machine were our first introduction to ideas about the relationship of technology and culture. But revisiting such works offers more significant rewards than just reliving our youth. Popular literature both shapes and reflects public perceptions of technology. It helps us understand a dialogue that is at best unevenly informed by issues that concern academic historians. Digging into popular classics can reveal once-pressing public concerns about technological issues that never played a central role in the scholarly historiography, or make us aware of technological myths that endure despite the best efforts of scholars to debunk them.²

The Soul of a New Machine was first published by Little, Brown in 1981. Twenty-three years later, after many printings, it is still a readable and even exciting story of computer design and corporate culture. It offers an inside look at working engineers, technical managers, and a complex technology in the making. Even for those who are not particularly drawn to this episode in computer history, Soul has become a fascinating primary document, a valuable example of the heroic genre of popular storytelling about technology and technological innovation in the United States.

Overview

Starting in 1979, Tracy Kidder spent eighteen months documenting the conceptualization, design, and implementation of a new minicomputer at Data General Corporation, located in Westborough, Massachusetts, and a major player in the early minicomputer industry. His narrative employs anecdotes about individuals to launch and tie together investigations of the corporate background, the management styles, and the techniques of designing and building computers. He starts by telling about Tom West, the manager who imagined the Eagle Project and then led the race to complete it. West's goal was to build a computer, the MV-8000, to compete with the then-brand-new Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX, and to finish it before the scheduled completion of another minicomputer project going on simultaneously within Data General.

Kidder details West's efforts to get others in the company to sign on to his project, and in the process introduces the reader to various key actors, especially the technical managers and the young engineers he dubs "the Hardy Boys" (those who designed the circuitry) and "the Microkids" (those who wrote the microcode of the machine). Anecdotes about this cast of characters are mixed with often detailed (but never dull) descriptions of the work they did, the result being an almost anthropological analysis of the engineering process that remains a valuable contribution to studies in technology and culture. Kidder does not gloss over the tedium, mistakes, and general chaos of the engineering design process. He delves as readily into descriptions of new technology and the problems encountered trying to make it work as into the more easily told personal histories and tales of corporate intrigue. As a result, the book is as much about computer engineering as it is about computers and computer engineers. Even today, when computer literacy is higher than it was in 1981, Kidder's lucid descriptions of such subjects as microcoding and debugging convey helpful information about the day-to-day work of constructing computers.

That Kidder was able to write an exciting story about what is often tedious and esoteric work is a tribute to his skills as a writer. Soul is a cut above even most well-written nonfiction, as its Pulitzer Prize attests. As Kidder traces the project from conception through...