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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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”.
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.
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.
_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.".
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.