The Soul of a New Machine

COMPUTERS TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

BOOK REPORT

'The Soul of a New Machine' by Tracy Kidder

1981. New York: Avon Publishing

An underlying message

There is I believe a single quote from this book that encapsulates almost entirely its underlying message:

"No one ever pats anyone on the back around here. If de Castro ever patted me on the back, I'd probably quit"

Herein lies the soul, not a soul of silicon or of steel yet no less tangible. It is human soul that manifests itself through the endeavors of a team of computer designers working at the frontiers of human knowledge and engineering.

A vision of high-tech America

Celebrated for its insight into the world of corporate, high-technology America, the book earned the author a Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1982. But this book holds far more for its reader, so much more than a mere insight, superficial, into the world of high-tech. Its pages are full of an insight that goes far deeper than that. I would venture that most of its insights are not about corporations, nor business, nor high-tech, but about people.

On the surface it gives the reader a factual and extremely detailed account of a team of engineers who between them create a new mini-computer (those machines you more often than not find in businesses and which have now in the most part been surpassed in power by the now ubiquitous desktop PC), a machine, advanced for its day (the story begins back in the late 1970's), but in many ways just another machine that, set against the developments in computing technology that have taken place since then, pales into insignificance performance-wise.

Interwoven throughout its pages are extremely accessible descriptions of the technology that these early machines encompassed, the tangible hardware comprising: the CPU (Central Processor Unit), the IP (Instruction Processor), the ATU (Address Translation Unit), and the IOC (Input/Output Control Board). And of the software: Machine Code, Microcode and Operating System, those ethereal intangible electron flows, those bits and bytes of binary control data that breath life into those hardware components so that we humans can interact with the machine.

A human drama

Certainly it tells us the story of high-tech industry and it's products. It tells us the story of the hoards of engineers and marketing men that built and sold to the these new machines to the world from enormously powerful computer vendor companies of the ilk of IBM and DEC, those huge conglomerates that once dominated the world of computing around twenty or thirty years ago.

The quotes above and those similar however, begin to lead the reader towards another far less obvious, perhaps even subliminal, moral that underlies this tale, and this is a very human tale that encompasses those individual stories that more often than not remain hidden in the noise. Kidder paints for us a vivid picture of U.S. corporate dynamics in the world of high-tech, but once this background scene is set, he then begins to assemble against it the individual characters who will play out this human drama.

"I'm a little suspicious of the great, overarching view. It always leaves something out," says Kidder. "What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives."

The story is about team-work, about the individuals who serve to make up a team, and in this instance 'serve' is the operative word; Most certainly there was personal fulfillment at work here and many of the individual 'players' in this story were certainly pursuing their own personal dreams and desires but rarely did these personal gains occur at the expense of the overall project, the goal of which provided the overriding focal point for their seemingly individual efforts. He tells us of their past lives, how they got here, of their childhood, of what motivates them and of their love for what they do.

Inspirational Management

It is also a story of inspired management, about individual commitment, about responsibility but above all of these, it is about inspired, eminently intelligent, leadership. And, it was that leadership, embodied in the character of Tom West, that tied all of these individual processes together, aimed them and fired them off in one unified direction.

Kidder through this work is attempting to define the indefinable: To define not just what it means to be a pioneer, but how it feels to be a pioneer, those people, some ordinary, some not so ordinary, who stand at the frontier, in this case the frontier of human technological endeavor and step out into the unknown, with all that this entails in both risk and reward. This is all about the true risk takers and about those human emotional gains that can only accrue when one gives one's all to something. And there were casualties along the way.

A entirely fabricated vision

The vision to which all are committed is fabricated almost entirely by West and his closest colleagues in management. There is pretence here, there is fabricated drama, fabricated pressures and constraints. And yet the lessons learned are themselves extremely real. West takes this risk: the hope that the product he and his team are creating will one day secure the fortunes of Data General; To begin with at least, senior management at Data General shift their focus to other developments going on elsewhere in the company. Thus, freed from the very real stresses that leading edge designers face within the computer industry from overwhelmingly fierce competition, West and his team pursue essentially their own private goals. But first, how to motivate a team who's work has been devalued and whose morale consequently undermined? West sticks his neck out and creates for his team an artificially competitive bubble within which they will function, and within which they will eventually excel. As a result this risk becomes his and his alone, he fights hard not for his own protection but for his team, for a purpose far greater than himself.

West knows only too clearly that he cannot achieve this aim on his own. He needs his team. He must