SOUL+OF+A+NEW+MACHINE




 * PROLOGUE: A GOOD MAN IN A STORM:**

The open sea is perhaps a surprising place to begin a book about the computer industry, but Kidder wants to provide a peek into the personality of Tom West and to establish a metaphor to understand the atmosphere of the 1980s computer industry in the early 1980s. First, a snapshot of West Engineers are not usually portrayed as emblems of rugged individualism, they have more of the "geek chic" in popular presentations, so it is interesting how Kidder decided to introduce us to West. It is also a reminder of how rugged and "buccaneer" the culture of innovation was at that time
 * **pg. 4-5. "Among them, Tom West appeared as a thin figure under a watch cap, in clearly constant motion. High spirits had apparently possessed him from the moment they set sail, and the longer they were out in the storm, the heavier the weather got, the livelier he grew. you could see him grinning in the dark. West did all the captain asked, so cheerfully, unquestioningly and fast, that one might have thought the ghost of an old-fashioned virtuous seaman had joined them. Only West never confessed to a queasy stomach. When one of the others asked him if he felt seasick too, he replied, in a completely serious voice, that he would not let himself . . . When the captain remarked worriedly that his boat had never gone so fast before, West laughed. he made the sound mostly in his throat. It was low and even noise. Odd in itself and oddly provoked, the kind of laughter that ghost stories inspire, it seemed to say, 'Here's something that's not ordinary.'"**
 * **pg. 6-7. On another occasion, just to make conversation, one of the crew asked West what sort of computer he was building now. West made a face and looked away, and muttered something about how //that// was work and this was his vacation and he would rather not think about //that.// The people who shared the journey remembered West. The following winter, describing the nasty northeaster over dinner, the captain reamrked, 'That fellow West is a good man in a storm.' The psychologist did not see West again, but remianed curious about him. 'He didn't sleep for four night! //Four whole nights.//' And if that trip had been his idea of a vacation, where, the psychologist wanted to know, did he work?"**


 * HOW TO MAKE A LOT OF MONEY**

pg. 9. "'Who was the architect?' 'We didn't have one!' cried the beaming press agent. Company engineers helped to design Westborough, and they made it functional and cheap. One contractor who did some work for Data General was quoted in //Fortune// as saying, 'What they call tough auditing, we call thievery.' However they accomplished it, Westborough cost only about nineteen dollars a square foot at the time when the average commercial building in Massachusetts was going for something like thirty-four dollars a foot. But looks do matter here. The company designed Westborough not just for the sake of thriftiness, but also to make plain to investors and financial analysts that Data General really is a thrifty outfit. 'There's no reason in our business to have an ostentatious display,' a company analyst for investor relations explained. 'In fact, it's detrimental.'"



pg. 9-10. "As for me, I imagined that somewhere in the building men in uniforms were watching me arrive, and I felt discouraged from walking on the grass. The only door that opens for outsiders leads to the front lobby. A receptionist asks you to sign a logbook, which inquires if you are an American citizen, wants your license plate number, and so on. Still you cannot pass the desk and enter the hallways beyond -- not until the employee you want to see comes out and gives your escort. When I inquired, the cheerful young receptionist said that once in a great while some outsider would try to break the rules and //try// to slip inside." pg. 10-11. "The First NOVA . . . was the first computer that Data General ever sold. But the animal in there isn't stuffed, the computer is functioning . . .The TV screen was blue. The graphs, etched in white, appeared in rotating sequence . . . The profits rolled in, year after year, along a nearly straight line, at about 20 percent (before taxes) of those burgeoning net sales. Someone unaccustomed to reading financial reports might have missed the full import of the numbers on teh scree, the glee and madness in them. Btu anyone could see that they started small and got big fast. Mechanically, monotonously, the computer int eh case was telling an old familiar story -- the international, materialistic fairy tale come true." pg. 11. ". . . IBM quickly established worldwide hegemony; it brought to computers the world's best sales force, all dressed in white shirts and blue suits. For some years the computer industry consisted almost exclusively of IBM and several smaller companies -- 'IBM and the seven dwarfs,' business writers liked to say . . . in the 1960s IBM produced a family of new computers, called the 360 line . . . the project cost more than the development of the atom bomb, but it paid off handsomely. It guaranteed for a long time to come IBM's continued preeminence in the making of computers for profit." pg. 11. "In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer's power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, through subtlety went into its design. It did mainly bookkeeping and math, by rote procedures, and it did them far more quickly than they had ever been done before. But computers were relatively scarce, and they were large and very expensive. Typically, one big machine served an entire organization. Often it lay behind a a plate glass window, people in white gowns attending it, and those who wished to use it did so through intermediaries. Users were like supplicants. The process could be annoying." pg. 11. "Scientists and engineers, it seems, were the first to express a desire for a relatively inexpensive computer that they could operate themselves. The result was a machine called a minicomputer. In time, the demand for such a machine turned out to be enormous . . . IBM ignored it, and so the field was left open for aspiring entrepreneurs -- often, in this case, young computer engineers who left corporate armies with dreams of building corporate armies of their own." pg. 14. "I once asked a press agent for a computer company what was the reason for all this enthusiasm. he held a hand before my face and rubbed his thumb across his fingers. 'Money,' he whispered solemnly. 'There's so goddamn much money to be made.' Examples of spectacular success abounded. The industry saw some classic dirty deals and some notable failures, too. RCA and Xerox lost about a billion dollars apiece and GE about half a billion making computers. It was a gold rush. IBM set up two main divisions, each one representing the other's main competition. Other companies did not have to invent competitors and did somewhat more of their contending externally. Some did sometimes use illicit tools. Currying favor, seeking big orders, some salesmen of semiconductors, for instance, were known for whispering to one computer maker news about another computer maker's latest unannounced product. Firms fought over patents, marketing practices and employees, and once in a while someone would get caught stealing blueprints or other documents, and for these and other reasons computer companies often went to court." pg. 16-17. "What also doesn't show is the fact that some of these young men were already computer engineers of no mean repute -- their age in this case was no impediment, for computer engineers like athletes often blossom early." pg. 17. ".. . the people who bought minicomputers -- engineers, scientists, and, mainly, purchasing agents of OEMs -- understood the machines. A new manufacturer could reach them through relatively inexpensive ads in the trade journals, and didn't need ot build a service organization right away, since these customers could take care of themselves. These were also the sorts of customers who could be expected to embrace a newcomer, if the price was right; they'd prefer a bargain to a brand name." pg. 19. "The differences showed up in the nature of a company's expenditures. IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were actually going to sue them, not to middlemen, and this market required good manners. Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive. Minicomputer companies split the differences more or less; they sold some machines and service to actual users, but spent most of their money on hardware and did a big business by selling machines in quantity to OEMs. From these distinctions, others hung. A seasoned executive in marketing explained, 'With micros it's even more competitive, but historically the world of minicomputers is very rough-and-tumble. IBM would say, 'You got a problem, Mr. Customer? A team of four will be there in an hour.' Implicitly a Data General would say to its customers, 'You have to look out for yourselves.' The sophisticated customers particularly the OEM who buys a lot of computers and looks for discounts, not service, goes for minis. They're capable of living in a rough-and-tumble world. . . '" pg. 21. "'. . . We had to distinguish ourselves from DEC,' Kluchman remembered. 'DEC was known as a bland entity. Data General was gonna be unbland, aggressive, hustling, offering you more for your money. . . We spread the idea that Data General's salesmen were more aggressive than DEC's, and they were, because ours worked on commissions and their worked on salaries.'" []

pg. 24. "In a land of rough and ready companies, their, some of Data General's employees seemed to want to think, was the toughest and the readiest around. Certainly Data General's reputation had other underpinnings beside advertisements and imagination. In an industry where sharp marketing practices were common, Data Genera's were as sharp as any, and by the late 1970s competitors were challenging some of them in court . . . Data General played especially rough with its customers . . ." pg. 25. "Building 14A/B and its sparse furnishings, the facts that Data General paid its stockholders no dividends and that its top managers dispensed to themselves and other officers exceptionally small salaries, meting out rewards in the form of stock instead -- all were signs of a common purpose . . . the management seemed bent on saving all their ash to feed the hungry beast of growth. And, of course, the more this beast gets fed, the bigger it becomes, and the more it wants to eat." pg. 26-7. "Where did the risks lie? Where could a company go badly wrong? In many cases, a small and daily growing computer company did not fall on hard times because people suddenly stopped wanting to buy its products. On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxiate on its own success. Demand for its products would be soaring . . .when all of a sudden something would go wrong with their system of production. They wouldn't be able to produce the machines that they has promised to deliver. Lawsuits might follow. At the least, expensive parts would sit in inventory, revenues would fall, customers would go elsewhere or out of business themselves . . . Another way of fouling up had less to do with a company's own growth than with the growth occurring all around it. From observers of the industry came such comments as: 'Things change fast in the computer business. A year is a hell of a long time. . . conventional wisdom held that if a company fell very far behind its competitors in producing the latest sorts of machines, it would have a hard time catching up. And failure to stay abreast could have serious consequences, because major new computers played crucial roles in the other business of companies; they helped them sell all their little products and, often, their older types of machines." pg. 27. "At some companies, the task of guarding against this sort of crisis fell mainly to engineers, working below decks, as it were. Executives might make the final decisions about what would be produced, but engineers would provide most of the ideas for new products. After all, engineers were the people who really knew the state of the art and who were therefore best equipped to prophesy changes in it. At Data General, an engineer could play such an important role. It was there for the taking. The president, de Castro, liked 'self-starters,' it was said. Initiative was welcomed at Data General, and in the late seventies it appeared that the company had need of some initiative from its engineers."


 * THE WARS**

pg. 29-30. "'Everyone thinks they want one now. It's an emotional issue . . .' As for the present state of affairs, sometimes [West] called it 'a disaster.' some times he would say, 'We're gonna get schmeared if we don't react to VAX.' . . . Data General . . . had not yet produced a computer of this class . . . it was a matter of keeping up appearances: customers get married to their computer companies . . . they don't usually want to get or stay married to a company that has fallen behind the start of the art . . . You did not have to be first . . . but you had to produce yours before the new market really opened and customers had made other marriages. For once they are lost, both old and prospective customers are often gone for good. It had been painful for West and for a number of engineers working with him at Westborough to watch DEC's VAX go to market, to hear it described as 'a breakthrough,' and not have a brand-new machine of their own to show off." pg. 30. "Secretly, West felt afraid of VAX. DEC has published a great deal of technical literature describing VAX, and West had read all of it. Nothing in this material had made him feel that his team's approach was inferior to DEC's. In some engineers, however, reading does not constitute knowing. For them, touch is the first of the senses." pg. 32. "'. . . I think I got a high when I looked at it and saw how complex and expensive it was. It made me feel good about some of the decisions we've made.' Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC's corporate organization. He felt that VAX was too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system of by which various parts of the machined communicated with each other; for his taste, there was too much protocol involved. He decided that VAX embodied flaws in DEC's corporate organization. The machine expressed that phenomenally successful company's cautious, bureaucratic style. Was this true? West said it didn't matter, it was a useful theory. Then he rephrased his opinions. 'With VAX, DEC was trying to minimize the risk,' he said, as he swerved around another car. Grinning, he went on: 'We're trying to maximize the win, and make Eagle go as fast as a raped ape.'" pg. 32. "Some of the engineers closest to West suspected that if he weren't given a crisis to deal with once in a while, he would create one. To them he seemed so confident and happy in an emergency. But as for this big crisis in the little world of Westborough engineering, although West had made it his own, no one would say he had invented it." pg. 33. "Some computer engineers harbor strong feelings toward their new designs, like Cossacks toward their horses. Carl Alsing, a veteran engineer, who, upon being informed that this plans or a new machine had been scrapped by the managers of his company, got a gun and murdered a colleague whose design had been accepted. Alsing said he thought that such a murder really happened but that a woman was probably involved -- yet it came, he said, to much the same thing." pg. 36. "For one thing, word had come down to that the FHP project was being transferred to North Carolina. Some of the engineers who had been working on that grand new machine refused to pack up their families and go south. At least some of them felt robbed. 'You gotta understand,' said West later. 'FHP was the one thing in the world they wanted to do most, the biggest-thing-the-world's-ever-seen kind of thing. Somebody told those guys that they would have seventy-two uninterrupted hours with the girl of their dreams. The thing they most wanted to do was dangled before the and then pulled away. And some people were pissed.' . . . de Castro said the Research Triangle Park area has 'a different feel' than . . . Westborough. 'The ambition level is different . . . There is a can-do attitude and that environment is contagious.' . . . 'Morale hit an all-time low at Westborough.'" pg. 37-9. ". . . those who stayed behind felt determined to build something elegant . . . The people working on EGO, nominally working for West but in fact amenable then to no one's control, truly labored. They worked nights. They worked weekends. They argued hotly with each other. 'It was the most incredible, soaring experiences of my life,' said one of them later. And they worked with astonishing speed. Within two months they had a fairly complete specification. Then they took it to de Castro . . . 'It's a dilemma,' It's a famous quote for him, never heard before or since. I said, 'Okay, we'll stop building EGO,' and de Castro walked out of the room.' West told himself that his team hadn't lost; they'd merely retreated from a battle they couldn't win. Thinking of the promises North Carolina had made, West explained later on: 'They'd signed up to do the impossible. We weren't signed up to do anything. Right then, that looked like a pretty good position to be in.'" pg. 39-40. "'Engineering is a man's world. I don't know how much territorial interests have to do with it, but they're all fighting for that piece of the pie. There are some who can't admit it, but all of them are. . . I knew the minute they hit the department. Such depression. It was terrible, absolutely terrible.'. . . A few quit. Others went on vacation immediately. Still others spent the next couple of weeks playing a game called Adventure." pg. 42-3. "By the mid-1960s, a trend that would become increasingly pronounced was already apparent: while the expense of building a computer's hardware was steadily declining, the cost of creating both user and system software was rising. In an extremely bold stroke, IBM took advantage of the trend. . . all of the machines in the family were software compatible. . . Users become attached to their programs and system software. Software is expensive. Getting it to function properly often takes time. Software that works is precious. users don't idly discard it. . . Total software compatibility made it easy for customers to do what IBM wanted them to do, which was to buy several different kinds of 360 computers. A customer could buy a small one now and later on buy a bigger one, or vice versa, without having to re-create any software. . . Soon every manufacturer of computers were employing some variation of IBM's 360 strategy of software compatibility." pg. 45-6. "'Are you guys gonna do it or sit on your ass and complain?' It's a challenge he throw at them. So he basically made us stop moaning about the demise of Westborough.' Alsing went on: 'West brought us out of our depression into the honesty of pure work. he put new life into a lot of people's jobs, I think." . . . their corner of the building now had the air of a commuter train about it, and at others, the silent intensity of a university library one the eve of exams . . . In the conversation around there you heard words and phrases such as these: A //canard// was anything false, usually a wrongheaded notion entertained by some other group or company; things could be done in ways that created //no muss, no fuss//, that were //quick and dirty,// that were //clean. Fundamentals// were the source of all right thinking, and weighty sentences often began with the adverb //fundamentally,// while //realistically// prefaced many flights of fancy. There were talk of //wars, shootouts, hired guns// and people who //shot from the hip.// The //win// was the object of all this sport and //the big win// was something that could be achieved by //maximizing// the smaller one. From the vocabulary alone, you could have guessed that West had been there, and that these engineers were up to something." pg. 46-7. "The answer, one possible answer, was that West had two ways of describing Eagle. One way made it sound important and glorious; the other like something routine. West explained: 'You gotta distinguish between the internal promotion to the actual workers and the promoting we did externally to other parts of the company. Outside the group I tried to low-key the thing. I tried to dull the impression that this was a competing product with North Carolina. I tried to sell it externally as not much of a threat. I was selling insurance; this would be there if something went wrong in North Carolina. . . We had to get the resources quietly, without creating a big brouhaha, and it's difficult to get a lot of external cooperation under those circumstances.'"


 * BUILDING A TEAM**

pg. 51. "The basement, it seemed, was never empty. Even in the small hours of the morning someone would be sitting in a little pool of light in a cubicle, working. By day, the place held a throng. I saw them all collected once, out back in the parking lot, during a fire drill. I counted only a couple of black faces, but I saw many women, many of them in skirts, and I presumed most were secretaries, because I knew that here as in the industry generally female engineers were scarce. Men were numerous. Most looked as though they were in their twenties. Only a few wore jackets and ties; the rest were dressed casually and, on the whole, neatly." pg. 52. "Physicians hand diplomas in their waiting rooms. Some fishermen mount their biggest catch. Downstairs in Westborough, it was pictures of computers. When engineers finished a project and word of approval came down . . . then the Marketing Department would usually hand out to each person who ahd helped to create the new computer a framed photograph of it." pg. 52-3. "The picture was just a photo of an immobile plastic box, but the former Data General engineer gazed at it, and he smiled. 'It was a lot of fun, a lot of pressure. With the Eclipse there was a tremendous amount of team spirit. We were going twenty-four hours a day debugging that prototype, breathing on it hard to make it come to life.. West did an awful lot of the debugging. I would say he's an excellent engineer. I really think that Tom was very much a problem solver . . .' . . . West appeared to be just a good, competent circuit designer, but strikingly adept at finding and fixing teh flaws in a computer. 'A great debugger'" pg. 56. "'West,' said one young engineer, 'is a prince of darkness.' He had changed. There was no denying that. Though remaining as close to him as anyone in the basement, Alsing rarely saw him after work anymore. Almost no one from Westborough did, it seemed. West was Alsing's boss now; that was part of it. But he wasn't as obviously happy and merry as he had been, and his jokes, though Alsing still found them witty, tended no toward the sardonic. He'd smile with one side of his mouth, whereas he used to grin with all of it. Every so often, Alsing did see flashes of the old West . . .To be sure, most of the humor and merriment was still missing, and this fellow of formerly eclectic passions now seemed completely single-minded." pg. 56-8. "'Tom's obviously made some decision which I know nothing about,' [Rosemary Seale] said. 'He's decided he isn't gonna take his bat and ball and go home.' Later, she would say: 'I wanted to work for him. I coudl have gotten more pay elsewhere. I didn't understand it all, but I knew I wanted to work for him. I wanted to be part of the effort . . . I was doing something important . . . I can't leave,' she answered . . . 'It's like one of those terrible movies, I just have to see how it comes out. I just have to see what Tom's gonna do next.'" pg. 59. ". . . in the movie Cray said that he liked to hire inexperienced engineers right out of school, because they did not usually know what's supposed to be impossible. West liked the idea. He also realized, of course, that new graduates command smaller salaries than experienced engineers. Moreover, using novices might be another way in which to disguise his team's real intentions. Who would believe that a bunch of completely inexperienced engineers could produce a major CPU to rival North Carolina's 'Shall we hire kids, Alsing?' said West . . . To make it work they'd have to hire the very best new engineers they could find, ones who would know more about the state of the art in computers than they did. They told each other that they'd have to be sure not to turn away candidates just because the youngsters made them feel old and obsolete; on the contrary, those were the candidates they'd have to welcome. . . It was awfully risky. It was a compelling idea." pg. 59-60. ".. .the crew that worked on the hardware, the machine's actual circuitry, and the members of this crew were called, and called themselves, 'the Hardy Boys.' The other main part of the team worked on microcode. . .'the Microkids.'" pg. 60-1. "How was it to be one of 'the kids'? You were in no danger of being fired, but you didn't know that, and besides, when you are brand-new in a job you want to make a good impression right from the start. . . going to work for the Eclipse group could be a rough way to start out in your profession. You set out for your first real job with all the loneliness and fear that attend new beginnings. . . though it's a job you've never really done before, you are told that you have almost no time at all in which to master a virtual encyclopedia of technical detail and to start producing crucial pieces of a crucial new machine. And you want to make a good impression. So you don't have any time to meet women. . . You're working at a place that looks like something psychologists build for testing the fortitude of small animals and your boss won't even say hello to you. . . 'I like my job, it's great, I enjoy it. But it's not what I do for recreation. Outside of work, I do other things. . . I haven't done any of that lately. Because I've been working too much.'" pg. 61-2. "A newcomer could expect to earn something like $20,000 a year. . . but most seemed to view the prospect of stock as a mere sweetener, and most agreed with Ken Holberger, a sublieutenant of Hardy Boys, who declared, 'I don't work for money.' Some of the recruits said they like the atmosphere. . . it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work was interesting. That was the main thing." pg. 63. "By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success. You agreed to forsake, if necessary, family hobbies, and friends -- and if you had any of thee left (and you might not if you had signed up too many times before). From a manager's point of view, the practical virtues of the ritual were manifold. Labor was no longer coerced. Labor volunteered. When you signed up you in effect declared, 'I want to do this job and I'll give it my heart and soul.'" pg. 63-4 "'Engineering school prepares you for big projects, and a lot of guys wind up as transformer designers. It's a terrible letdown, I think They end up with some rote engineering job with some thoroughly known technology that's repetitive, where all you have to do is look up the answers in books.' pg. 66. "('We tell him that we only let in the best. Then we let him in.') 'I don't know,' said Alsing, after it was all done. 'It was kid of like recruiting for a suicide mission. You're gonna die, but you're gonna die in glory.'"


 * WALLACH'S GOLDEN MOMENT**

pg. 67. "A young computer engineer, know to be one of the most skillful in Westborough's basement, said he had a fantasy about a better job than this. In it, he goes to work as a janitor for a computer company whose designs leave much to be desired. There, at night, disguised by mop and broom, he sneaks into the offices of the company's engineers and corrects the designs on their blackboards and desks. Dreams of pure freedom were not uncommon in the basement. For those who had such fantasies, the best job imaginable would allow them to try to build the unattainable, the perfect computer. What, by contrast, would be one of the worst jobs? One that obliged and engineer to build a kludge. Tom West had to deal with such feelings. This was one of the first and most difficult of his problems." pg. 68. "He'd get Wallach to sign up somehow. Wallach, he believed, really did want to work on a 32-bit Eclipse, he just didn't know it yet. West knew Wallach. he figured that as much as Wallach wanted to work with a clean sheet of paper and no constraints, he wanted two other things more. These were tangible success and revenge . . .In one of his first jobs, Wallach worked as junior engineer on a piece of fancy new computer. But just as that machine was nearly complete, Honeywell merged with General Electric, and when the dust settled the new computer had been scrapped. It never came to light. If Job had been a computer engineer, his travail would have begun in that way. 'Engineers want to produce something,' said Wallach. 'I didn't go to school for six years just to get a paycheck. I thought that if this is what engineering's all about, the hell with it.' He went to night school to get a master's in business administration. 'I was always looking for the buck. I'd get the M.B.A, go back to New York, and make some money,' he figured. But he didn't really want to do that. He wanted to build computers.'" pg. 75. "'But haven't you realized yet that the way to prove someone wrong is to build the right thing?' West asked, time and time again. Finally, somewhat exasperated, but also suspecting that Wallach was ready to yield, West forced the issue. 'Either you do this or your job description is inoperative,' he said to Wallach one day. The phrasing appealed greatly to Wallach, and he could see that West was probably right Conceiving architectures was his job and Eagle was the only project around that needed an architect. But Wallach had seen too many projects canceled in spite of their merits to believe that Eagle would go out the door just because it promised to be a good commercial machine. he wasn't going that route again. Wallach wanted to talk to de Castro. This was not a completely extraordinary request; de Castro's office, Wallach knew, would usually open for an engineer who ha something to say." pg. 80-1. "Although they are generally shy about claiming to have had one, engineers often speak of 'the golden moment' in order to describe the feeling -- it comes rarely enough -- when the scales fall from a designer's eyes and a problem's right solution is suddenly there. The chief virtue of Wallach's scheme was its simplicity. It would be relatively cheap and easy to implement in hardware and software, and it should work efficiently and reliably. When Alsing saw Wallach's brief description of the plan, he said to Wallach, 'That's nice.' Later, out of Wallach's earshot, he said more. 'Rings have been around. They're old hat. What makes Wallach a good Data General engineer is that he came up with a really elegant subset of those ideas -- simple, sweet, cheap, efficient, clean. And I can't believe I just said that about Wallach.' As for Wallach, after he had drawn the diagram, he stared at it, wondering for a moment, 'Where did that come from?' He kept eyeing it. 'That looks pretty cool.'" pg. 81. "Wallach was a scholar of computer architectures. . . He imagined himself standing in front of a roomful of experts when Eagle was all done. They would question him about the architecture, inserting sharp little knives in his flanks and then twisting them. 'Why didn't you do it this way, Steve, when it's obviously better?' And, as he imagined it, his only possible defense would be to plead weakly and traitorously that the company had prevented him from really showing his stuff." pg. 83. "'//They// wrote the memo,' said Wallach, 'so that the idea would be perceived as coming from them, just in case we ever got called on it.' Wallach went on: 'A lot of things we did were unique to that environment. It's clear they weren't always the way things should be done.' 'But you enjoyed doing things that way?' I suggested. 'We all enjoyed it,' he said. 'Anytime you do anything on the sly, it's always more interesting than if you do it up front.'"


 * MIDNIGHT PROGRAMMER**

pg. 87. "When first invented, the program for Adventure had traveled widely, like a chain letter, from coast to coast among computer engineers and buffs. It had arrived in Westborough just in time for the aftermath of the EGO wars. It was everywhere now; grade-schoolers were playing it." pg. 89-90. "How can the machine perform its tricks? The general answer lies in fact that computers can follow conditional instructions. They can take two values and compare them -- that comes down to simple arithmetic -- and, if so commanded, can perform one action if the values are equal and another if they are not. In this ability to follow conditional instructions -- an ability built into the machine -- lies much of the computer's power. You can set before it, in sequence, bifurcating webs of conditional instructions, until the machine appears to make sophisticated decisions on its own." pg. 90. "To the two computers that the Eclipse Group used, the engineers had given the names Woodstock and Trixie, after characters in comic strips. They often spoke about these computers as if they had personalities. When especially frustrated, one Microkid would walk into the lab where Trixie resided and yell at the machine. Alsing said: 'A lot of people are really tired of anthropomorphize your car and the analogy works, and then at some level it doesn't. We anthropomorphize bi business, the military and so on, as some strange creatures with alien personalities. I that that's sane, I think that's normal. You tend to have to anthropomorphize the computer. It presents a face, a person to me -- a person in a thousand different ways . . . We've anthropomorphized Trixie to a ridiculous event,' he said." pg. 92-3. "Alsing's childhood did not leave him with an abundance of sweet memories . . . I remember discovering in third grade that there was a pecking order -- 'Hey, there's a pile and I'm on the bottom of it.' I was a very depressed kid in third grade.' He vividly recalled the day when he skipped recess, usually a painful event for him anyway, and instead worked at his desk on the design of a telephone. He wanted to find out how the thing could possibly capture a voice. It seemed to him an improbable instrument, one that shouldn't work . . . Then he took the family phone apart. Finally, he figured it out to his satisfaction. 'This was a fantastic high, something I could get absorbed in and forget that I had these other social problems . . . Boolean algebra was something that made perfect sense, and thus it was a rare commodity for him. He called it beautiful." pg.95-6. ". . . Alsing found out that a student could walk into that room at night and play with the computer . . . 'I was a midnight programmer,' he confessed . . . That was was made it fun; he could actually touch the machine and make it obey him. 'I'd run a little program and when it worked, I'd get a little high, and then I'd do another. It was neat. I Ioved writing programs. I could control the machine. I could make it express my own thoughts. It was an expansion of the mind to have a computer. About ten other young, male undergraduates regularly attended these sessions of midnight programming. 'It was a whole subculture. It's been popularized now, but it was a secret cult in my days,' said Alsing. 'The game of programming -- and it was a game -- was so fascinating. We'd stay up all night and experience it. It really is like a drug, I think.'" pg. 101-2. "Much of the engineering of computers takes place in silence, while engineers pace in hallways or sit alone and gaze at blank pages. Alsing favored the porch and staring out a trees. When writing code, he said, he often felt that he was playing an intense game of chess with a worthy opponent. He went on: 'Writing microcode is like nothing else in my life. For days there's nothing coming out. The empty yellow pad sits there in front of me, reminding me of my inadequacy. Finally, it starts to come. I feel good. That feeds it, and finally I get into a mental state where I'm a microcode-writing machine. It's like being in Adventure. Adventure's a completely bogus world, but when you're there, you're there . . . There's a low intensity before it and a letdown at the end. There's a big section where you come down off it, and sometiemsyou do it awkwardly and feel a little strange, wobbly and tired, and you want to say to your friends, 'Hey, I'm back.'" pg. 102-3. "But his habit of putting off the creation of code until all was almost lost probably did hurt him. During his months of procrastination, he wondered why he couldn't get down to work and came to believe that he was simply lazy, and he guessed that he let it show in little way -- an averting of eyes, a slump in the shoulders. And partly because of that, perhaps, and certainly because of the anxiety he created, he did not receive a substantial gift of stock for his work on the Eclipse, although some other engineers got tidy rewards." pg. 105-6. "He didn't want simply to give them a stack of manuals and say, 'Figure it out.' So he made up a game. As the Microkids arrived, in ones and twos, during the summer of 1978, he told each of them to figure how to write a certain kind of program in Trixie's assembly language. This program must fetch and print out the contents of a certain file, stored inside the computer. 'So they learned the way around the system and they were very pleased,' said Alsing. 'But when they came to the file finally, they found that access to it was denied to them.' The file in question lay open only to people endowed with what were called 'superuser privileges.' Alsing had expected the recruits to learn how to find this file and, in the process, to master the system. He was equally interested in seeing what they would do when they found they couldn't get the file. One after the other, they came to him and said, 'I almost have it.' 'Okay,' said Alsing, 'but you don't have it.'" pg. 109-110. "[Alsing] made a point of sharing lunchtime with some of them several days a week. And they appreciated Alsing's friendliness; they could always talk to him. Alsing believed that the team's managers, in handling the new recruits, really were practicing what was called 'the mushroom theory of management.' It was an old expression, used in many other corners of corporate America. The Eclipse Group's managers defined it as follows: 'Put'em in the dark, feed'em shirt, and watch'em grow.' it was a joke with substance, Alsing felt; and he believed that their mushroom management needed and occasional antidote."


 * FLYING UPSIDE DOWN**

pg. 111-113. "West often said that they were playing a game, called getting a machine out the door of Data General with their names on it. What were the rules? . . . the competition between Eagle and North Carolina was institutionalized; each project lay in the domain of a different vice president . . . de Castro liked to see a little competition stirred up among teams. Let them compete with their ideas for new products, and bad ideas, as well as the negative points of good ones, are likely to get identified inside the company and not out in the marketplace . . . From the first rule -- that you must compete for resources -- it followed that if your group was vying with another for the right to get a new machine out the door, then you had to promise to finish yours sooner, or at least just as soon as the other team promised . . . Promising to achieve a nearly impossible schedule was a way of signing up -- the subject of the third rule, as I saw it. Signing up required. . . that you do whatever was necessary for success, including putting in lots of overtime, for no extra pay. The fourth rule seemed to say that if the team succeeded, those who had signed up would get a reward. . . I think those were the rules that they were playing by, and when I recited them to some of the team's managers, they seemed to think so, too." pg. 113. "They lived in a land of mists and mirrors. Mushroom management seemed to be practiced at all levels in their team. Or perhaps it was a version of Steve Wallach's ring protection system made flesh: West feeling uncertain about the team's real status upstairs; West's own managers never completely aware of all that their boss was up to; and the brand-new engineers kept almost completely ignorant of the real stakes, the politics, the intentions that lay behind what they were doing." pg. 115. "Then suddenly, you feel it, like a little trickle of sweat down your back. 'I've gotta hurry,' you say to yourself. 'I've gotta get this reading done and write my code. This is just one little detail. There's a hundred of these. I better get this little piece of code done today.' Practically the next time you look up, it's midnight, but you've done what you set out to do. You leave the basement thinking: 'This is life. Accomplishment. Challenges I'm in control of a crucial part of this big machine.' You look back from your car at the blank, brick, monolithic back of Building 14A/B and say to yourself, 'What a great place to work.' tomorrow you'll have to get to work on an instruction called FFAS. That shouldn't be too hard. When you wake up the next morning, however, FFAS is upon you 'Oh my Gold! FFAS. They need that code next week. I better hurry.' 'The pressure,' said Blau. 'I felt it from inside of me.'" pg. 116. "But not everyone works well under such conditions. Not everyone thinks it is worth it. . . A Microkid wants the hardware to perform a certain function. A Hardy Boy tells him, 'No way -- I already did my design for microcode to do that.' They make a deal: 'I'll encode this for you, if you'll do this other function in hardware.' 'All right.' What a way to design a computer! 'There's no grand design,' thinks Rosen. 'People are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands.'. . . he knows he can solve them, if he's just given the time. But the managers keep saying, 'There's no time.' Okay. Sure. It's a rush job. But this is ridiculous. No one seems to be in contorl; nothing's ever explained. Foul up, however, and the managers come at you from all sides. 'The whole management structure,' said Rosen. 'Anyone in Harvard Business School would have barfed.'" pg. 119-20. "On the Magic Marker board in his office, West wrote the following: //Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well.// Asked for a translation, he smiled and said, 'If you can do a quick-and-dirty job and it works, do it.' Worry, in other words, about how Eagle will look to a prospective buyer; make it an inexpensive but powerful machine and don't worry what it'll look like to the technology bigots when they peek inside. West espoused these principles of computer design: 'There's a whole lot of things you've gotta do to make a successful product. The technological challenge is one thing, but you can win there and still have a disaster. . . Another precept was 'No bells and whistles.' And a third: 'You tell a guy to do this and fit it all on one board, and I don't want to hear from him until he knows how to do it.'. . . To some the design reviews seemed harsh and arbitrary and often technically shortsighted. Later on, though one Hardy Boy would conceded that the managers had probably known something he hadn't yet learned: that there's no such thing as a perfect design. .. Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West was the voice from the cave, supplying that information: 'Okay. It's right. Ship it.'" pg. 122. "Some engineers likened the chips to an unassembled collection of children's building blocks. Some referred to the entire realm of chip design and manufacture as 'technology' as if to say that putting the chips together to make a computer was something else. a farmer might feel this way: 'technology' is the new hybrid seeds that come to the farm on the railroad, but growing those seeds is a different activity -- it's just raising food." pg 125. "It really should not happen -- it would constitute a software design error if it did, Blau said -- but just imagine that the instructions for the page fault program aren't in the memory system but are instead out on a disk somewhere. In order to get the instructions of the page fault program off the disk, Eagle would have to perform a page fault program, but it couldn't perform a page fault program to get the instructions until it already had them. It would be as if you had locked up a cabinet and left the key inside, Blau said. 'If this happens, the machine will fall down an endless series of mirrors.' pg. 128. "West had said that designing a computer was 'a mind game.' . . . Such games of logic, especially if they are played in a hurry -- while flying upside down -- can take a grip on an engineer's thought and hold on. After playing this way for a while, you look at a tree and, aha, it is clear that a tree is much like a computer . . . Chuck Holland said this unpleasant sensation, of being locked inside the machine, usually lingered three days -- on the rare occasion when he got away from the basement for that long . . . West usually drive out of Westborough fast after work. 'I can't talk about the machine.' he said one evening, bent forward over the steering wheel. 'I've gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I'm gonna go mad.'"


 * LA MACHINE**

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