Book Report: THE SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE

Book Report: THE SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE

Zhengdong Zhang

What’s a good man in a storm like? The prologue of the book draws a astonishing picture. The ship is winding in the billows, and the storm is howling. Almost all the travelers get thrown out by the rolling ship, and their mood is terribly in doom. But Tom West is an exception. In contradiction to his colleagues, he takes beer however hard the ship is rolling with a grin in the face that never twists. He do not sleep for four nights. Everybody else, including an psychologist, gets quite curious about when he will crash after staying up for four whole nights, but to their surprise, West just snapped, compared with his own job, these four nights are just easy days in a vacation.

As it turns out, that unbelievable harsh guy is an engineer building computers. For him, fighting with storm on a solo ship in the endless sea without any sleep for four nights is just fun. Then after all how harsh would his job, making computers, be? Actually it takes the author a whole book to answer that question roughly.

The competition between the companies are always fierce, which makes every competitors in the market nervous all the day. In 1980’s, DEC published the ever first 32-bit computer and temporarily beats the opponents. IBM and Data General thus get quite anxious about building a faster computer. For the two followers, the goal was clear, the deadline was set tight , but the task was so challenging that nobody in the company knew clearly how this faster 32-bit computer would look like. The pressure for competition itself already made the life of building computers harsh.

But competition did not happen just externally, the fight between different teams within the same company is also fierce. In Data General, West’s project, EGO, was canceled in the middle because the annoying political issues. Without any doubt, this internal competition would significantly reduce the resource each team could apply, and simultaneously some resource would be allocated to multiple teams for the same purpose, which was an unnecessary waste. Moreover, these political issues hurt a lot the enthusiasm of engineers. That made the task of building a computer even tougher.

In addition, the typical characteristics of engineers increased the difficulty of managing a team composed of such geeks. In general, these people were majorly egotist and did not care much about other people. In a sense, they were simple and they would talk whatever they wanted to and did not care the feeling of other people. Dealing with these geeks was no easy task and that resulted in tense peer pressure.

But even if all parts of the working environment were nice and comfortable, the task of building computer itself was so challenging that programmers must sign up for the job. Perhaps there were always periods in which the programmers work day and night without talking to anybody and just focused on one specific problem. That problem might be the micro-code for the ALU that required the programmer to completely think like a machine, also it might be a bug that came out of nowhere without any rhyme or rhythm(say the miss of a nand gate somewhere, or just the chips being dirty). These bugs were extremely difficult to trace. The programmers had to leave all they usually appreciated behind work: parents, family, children, hobbies or whatever was important to them other than the work. Arguably if you signed up too many times, you would lose everything. And also these work largely harm the health. These partially explained why the engineers were usually young and old ones were pretty rare.

Then why on earth talented engineers would devote all their life to such harsh jobs? Why would they give up their comfortable daily life and program all day and all night? Various engineers mentioned in the book raised the same answer consistently.

Freedom comes first. Only in data general they were given mental freedom to create and design their own product and there was no need for them to work hard on the trivial and boring routine tasks. Not like IBM where all the employees were well dressed in suits, engineers in Data General just wear casual T-shirts and jeans. They virtually felt they were not hired by the company, but by themselves. They had a wonderful feeling that they were their own boss. Even though that was just a feeling, not reality.

Self-satisfaction also made the boring life before computers interesting. The programmers thought they were not work on a product of a company, they were creating something out of nothing----New ways of writing microcode for the new ALU, new instruction set, new software and finally a new machine that nobody ever knew. In the process of building, they may get stuck somewhere. But once they overcome that through hard work and creativity, they would enjoy an overwhelming feeling of success and self-satisfaction. For them, that happiness, though just existing in an instant, supported them to go through all the unknown problems and guided them to the final goal step by step.

So after all, what’s the soul of a new machine? The book told answer implicitly in a series of stories of different engineers: Tom West’s management of the whole team and fight with the boss, Carl Alsing and his microkids, Wallach and many hardboys, and so on. These characters gave a clear plot of what made them tolerate so much pain and insist working. The soul of a new machine, is the soul of engineers that build the machine, is the harshness of the job and the  brave hearts that finishes these jobs, is a mix of all unknown possibilities and a hard process of searching and selecting among these possibilities.

But what impressed me mostly was the end of the story. After Tom West managed to build EAGLE and persuade the boss the make EAGLE into product, his boss just kept talking about the coolness of the machine without even mentioning West and his team. In the beginning, EAGLE was almost canceled because of the political issues. But the bosses in the end seemed completely forget the bad things they had done to the machine and just blew up in front of the media. There was a journalist that interview Tom West, the father of the machine. But she just asked whether this person had anything to do with the machine.

Not long time later, the whole EAGLE team broke up. Tom West left the company and many of the team members switch to other parts of the company. When the new machine was out, there was already no glue that could put the team together. Each team member fight with each other on how many contribution each made to the new machine. This was really sad. Only the project would put all these egotists together, and finish of the project was the death of the team agglomeration. The break up of the beam was naturally the consequence.