This posting brings back some memories.

I retired from the USAF in 1976 and then accepted a position to create micro and minicomputer maintenance courses at the local Community College. I got a grant of 50K for equipment and I purchased a Data General Nova computer and a bunch of Micro Computer training kits that was based on the Intel 8080 microprocessor. Then I went to the Data General plant in the Boston area for training on the Nova.

It was a fun time, the challenge of teaching kids fresh out of High School, after working with the USAF elite for so many years. This is when I developed an interest in programming in languages other than the 1's and 0's, octal and hexadecimal assembler world.


>Last night I was down in the basement to replace the furnace filter and took a detour rummaging through the boxes of books down there. These are the personal favorites (plus a few which stubbornly remain in my mental To Be Read stack despite years in an unread state) which survived a major book purge last year in which I donated hundreds of books to the library. Flip, flip, flip, then my hand stopped on "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. I picked it up, read the first few pages, and am rereading it now for about the fourth time. With all the pissiness here lately I thought I would recommend it in the spirit of positive karma.
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>On the surface it is an account of the minicomputer wars of the early 1980s between two Massachusetts companies -- how quaint -- Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Data General. DEC was the market leader, which Data General challenged with a new computer code named Eagle. Kidder somehow became embedded in the project, spending a year or more of days and nights with the project team.
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>The star of the book is Tom West, the development manager who was practically an idol in the engineering culture of Data General. The opening chapter of the book is called "A Good Man in a Storm" and is about West's sailing trip which went awry in a storm off the New England coast. They were stranded at sea for several days. According to his crewmates, West was the stalwart. He never lost hope, never stopped working without sleep, kept analyzing it and trying new things. If this is what he does for fun, one of them wondered later, what does he do for work?
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>It is not just West's story. The other members of the project team are vividly described. Many are young and ambitious. They pass through rigorous recruiting which is much psychological as technical. They looked for visionaries, not mere competence. One of the guys who was instrumental in hiring explained to Kidder that once we decide, we tell them we only let in the best, then let them in.
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>Some of them don't make it. Some are not as good as they interviewed. Others burn out. A memorable chapter focuses on a young guy, an absolutely great guy who has contributed to the machine, who takes his bicycle and drops out because he can't take the stress any more. The pressure to get the Eagle to market is intense.
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>Another memorable chapter is called "The Missing NAND Gate." A subtle bug emerges during testing which proves vexing to track down. If you think software testing is challenging, hardware testing is a thousand times worse. (Just ask the folks at Intel who shipped the Pentium chip with the math rounding error). Eventually they find the problem. Maybe it helps to be a geek to read this chapter as a satisfying detective story.
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>The last chapter is poignant. The Eagle has been renamed and launched, all commemorated by a product launch party. One of the glittery attendees makes conversation with West by asking if he had anything to do with the development. "Yes," West says simply. The other guy doesn't pursue it, just making small talk. A nearby engineer who overheard the conversation told Kidder how offended he was. That's the guy who made this whole f-ing thing happen, he wanted to holler. But Tom West was right. It was somebody else's machine now.
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>The edition I have, one of several available, is from the Modern Library. If you know anything about the Modern Library you know their titles do not skew toward computer books. Of course, TSOANM is about computers only in the sense "War and Peace" is about warfare. It won a Pulitzer Prize, another list not overweighted with computer titles. Highly recommended to geeks and non-geeks alike. As are several other of his books, for that matter.
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>http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Modern-Library/dp/0679602615/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253363322&sr=8-1