The Soul of a New Machine

Kidder embedded with a Data General engineering team in 1978 and 1979 as they designed a thirty-two bit minicomputer, the Eagle, in about a year with a small team, few resources and no official sanction at the start. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and remains the standard account of what engineering work actually involves.

The organisational situation drives the narrative. Data General had committed its resources to a different project in North Carolina, and Tom West's team in Massachusetts built a competing machine in parallel, initially concealed. West recruited young engineers straight from university, gave them problems beyond their experience, and used what the team called signing up, meaning a voluntary commitment to unlimited hours in exchange for the responsibility.

Kidder describes the technical work accurately enough to be followed by a non-specialist, covering microcode, the debugging process, the logic analyser and the physical assembly. He also describes the psychological structure: the pinball metaphor in which winning means being allowed to play again, the deliberate withholding of information by West to preserve the team's sense of ownership, and the exhaustion and departures that followed the project's completion.

The book is a period document. Minicomputers no longer exist, and the specific technology is obsolete. The organisational pattern it describes, in which a small unofficial team outbuilds a resourced official one, recurs constantly. The treatment of motivation, in which the reward for shipping is the chance to do it again, describes something that most management literature does not capture. There are almost no women in the account, which reflects the industry at that time.