The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder's 1981 Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award winner, The Soul of a New Machine, chronicles the development of a mainframe computer, the Eagle, at the Data General Corporation. In the book, Kidder provides a window into the high-tech culture of computer software and hardware engineering that few had previously seen, describing the culture of the fast-paced computer industry, along with the lives of the engineers who were seeking to accomplish the impossible.

Aside from earning prestigious awards, the book is considered a classic text about the culture of the computer industry, and is the benchmark against which all later books, such as Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, are compared. Many college courses in departments from computer science to sociology and English literature use the book as required reading. Its popularity is rooted in its vivid description of a computer-industry corporation, and in Kidder's writing style, which combined elements of storytelling common to fiction and of historical narrative common to journalism.

Kidder presents his inside look at the Data General Corporation in the form of an ethnography. Ethnographies are detailed studies of a group of individuals or a society by an author who observes and interviews participants to understand their culture. The book chronicles real events and people during the two-year development of Data General's big mainframe supercomputer, from its initial design phase to its product release. Kidder followed the lives of the engineers, staying by their side during 18-hour working days. He also observed their lives (or the lack thereof) outside of Data General with their families and friends.

Before Silicon Valley, the computer industry centered in Boston, with its prestigious universities and the technology companies surrounding them on the now-famous Route 128 highway. The computer-science graduates from these institutions provided a constant stream of new programmers and engineers to build the next greatest invention; their credo was, “The product is king, and we must beat the other companies to market.” In The Soul of a New Machine, the organizational culture of high-tech firms is exposed, allowing the reader to understand the “soul” of a new product.

The book is more than just a chronological description of the production process. It is a rich examination of the struggles and triumphs of the human spirit that go into the creation of a new machine or [Page 416]invention. As Kidder wrote, “Promising to achieve a nearly impossible schedule was a way of signing up … Signing up required, of course, that you fervently desire the right to build your machine and that you do whatever was necessary for success …” The tales of the individuals at Data General offer the reader a deeper understanding of the determination, drive, and conviction of engineers who are often maligned and dismissed as nerds and geeks.

Kidder's award-winning text on computer culture is still relevant today, offering an understanding of the high-tech industry and the feverish development of the Internet and new media. While labels such as Internet appliances and Web designers have been added to those of mainframes and software engineers, the underlying computer culture remains the same. The entrepreneurial spirit and sense of a higher calling are still very much a part of the individuals working in the Internet and computer industries.

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