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The computer revolution brought with it new methods of getting work done--just look at today's news for reports of hard-driven, highly-motivated young software and online commerce developers who sacrifice evenings and weekends to meet impossible deadlines. Tracy Kidder got a preview of this world in the late 1970s when he observed the engineers of Data General design and build a new 32-bit minicomputer in just one year. His thoughtful, prescient book, The Soul of a New Machine, tells stories of 35-year-old "veteran" engineers hiring recent college graduates and encouraging them to work harder and faster on complex and difficult projects, exploiting the youngsters' ignorance of normal scheduling processes while engendering a new kind of work ethic.

These days, we are used to the "total commitment" philosophy of managing technical creation, but Kidder was surprised and even a little alarmed at the obsessions and compulsions he found. From in-house political struggles to workers being permitted to tease management to marathon 24-hour work sessions, The Soul of a New Machine explores concepts that already seem familiar, even old-hat, less than 20 years later. Kidder plainly admires his subjects; while he admits to hopeless confusion about their work, he finds their dedication heroic. The reader wonders, though, what will become of it all, now and in the future. --Rob Lightner

From Library Journal
Pulitzer Prize winner Kidder's 1981 volume was published when mini-supercomputers were still the stuff of science fiction. How the world has turned. Though technology has grown immeasurably since then, this volume still serves as an interesting history of the machine that conquered the world.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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First Sentence:
All the way to the horizon in the last light, the sea was just degrees of gray, rolling and frothy on the surface. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
debugging schedule, page fault program, system cache, target instruction, logic analyzers, diagnostic program, mode bit Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Data General, Eclipse Group, Hardy Boys, North Carolina, System Cache, Main Memory, Sys Cache, New York, Carl Alsing, Chuck Holland, Jon Blau, Ken Holberger, Carl Carman, Tom West, Jim Guyer, Rosemarie Seale, Steve Wallach, Wall Street, Special Systems,