The Soul of a New Machine
Tracy Kidder
Atlantic/Little, Brown, $13.95
Like Midas in the ancient myth, they turn everything they touch to gold, those two magic words, high technology. What began as a term describing a new generation of technologies has become a catchword of our entire culture. We now have high-tech industries that will save our economy from ignominious decline, high-tech stocks that offer the one glimmer of hope for an otherwise gloomy Wall Street, even high-tech magazines, architecture, and interior design. In fact, high tech is emerging as a compelling cultural image, a new sensibility that dusts our aspirations for the future with the glitter of enormous possibility.
A recent beneficiary of high technology’s golden touch is Tracy Kidder’s book about the making of a computer, The Soul of a New Machine. In a brief three months since its publication, Kidder’s book has won universally laudatory reviews (including one on the front page of the New York Times Book Review) and a prominent place on best-seller lists of major newspapers across the country. Its author has appeared on the “Today” show and received a $30,000 grant from the Ford Foundation for his next book.
Why all this critical acclaim? Because in telling his story so well, Kidder has also helped sell the idea of high technology. He has made it accessible, even appealing, to a culture that once regarded it with indifference or distrust. By creating a myth about work in the computer industry he has breathed a “soul” into the silent machinery of high technology. And he has done so in a surprising, indeed extraordinary, way: by subtly portraying the world of high technology as the successor, rather than the arch-enemy, of the social movements of the 1960s.
Indeed, in Kidder’s rendering of the high-tech world, one finds both the energy and the values of that decade—its radical distrust of traditional forms of hierarchy, its ethic of liberation, and, most important, its dream of autonomous, unalienated, meaningful work. But whereas the movements of the ’60s perceived these values as profoundly political, in the high-tech ’80s they have become, appropriately, mere technical concerns. The social visions of ’60s radicalism have been reduced to the management problems of the high-tech firm. And the prototype of the liberated human being is now the computer engineer.
Kidder tells the story of the Eclipse Group, a team of engineers at the Data General Corporation. Their goal is to “get a machine out the door with their names on it” in record time. Kidder follows the team as they conceive the new computer, christened “Eagle,” try to sell the idea to management and other departments in the corporation, design and construct two prototypes, then undertake the long, arduous task of “debugging” which transforms the prototypes into smoothly functioning computers.
Stuck in the windowless basement of Data General’s Westborough, Massachusetts, complex, the young engineers of the Eagle Project, most of them fresh out of graduate school, have to contend with an unending series of obstacles. Working conditions are less than ideal. Team members are crammed into small cubicles; there is a shortage of everything from pencils to computer time; when an air conditioning system breaks down in the summer, it goes unrepaired until some of the Eclipse Group stage a wildcat strike. Hours are hellishly long: sixty-hour weeks are the rule. Financial rewards are meager: salaries range from $20,000 to $30,000, and there is no overtime. Promises of stock options if Eagle is a success are vague enough for most team members to discount them—and rightly so, it turns out. Deadline pressures are intense. And, most maddening of all, Data General management’s commitment to the Eagle Project is never entirely clear.
Nevertheless, these engineers pour themselves into their work, willingly postponing the pleasures of family, friends, and outside interests, in order to put their mark on the new machine. Kidder is intrigued by this choice; he considers it nothing short of heroic. As he sees these engineers, their building Eagle is notjust ajob, but a vocation. Again and again, he turns to religious metaphors and language to describe things normally seen as mundane or even profane. There is, most obviously, the purported “soul” of the new machine. Later, Data General’s positive cash flow becomes a “state of grace.” And the special workplace lingo of the Eclipse Group (an amalgam of technical jargon spiced with the terminology of the battlefield and obscenity of the locker room) is transformed, under Kidder’s pen, into “the beautiful and, to me, inscrutable language of the microelectronics era”-like Latin in the Middle Ages, the privileged dialect of the high-tech elect. One team member even speaks of the “priestly language” of programming, a language that sets these engineers apart from the world and at the same time endows them with a special status. “No one understands what we do,” remarks one of the team members, all of whom, Kidder reflects, lead “monastic lives.”
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