The Soul of an Old Machine
11 comments
·April 2, 2025canucker2016
One of the main technical nuances about the new Eclipse box mentioned in the book was the management edict for "no mode bit" in the machine architecture/CPU.
The book never explains how the team solved this restriction.
Someone asked that exact question and Carl Alsing himself (head of the Microkids) answers the question, see https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/44915/data-general-mv...
forrestpitz
"Soul" is one of my favorite books. Kidder writing is phenomenal. He explains complex topics with ease and the storytelling drags you in from introduction. I also think it might be the best example of what great management looks like. Tom West isn't the focus of the story but without his hand none of it could have existed. Cannot recommend highly enough.
habosa
I just finished this book a few weeks ago, it was excellent. I don’t normally read nonfiction, and when I do I avoid reading about business or technology. Despite this book being all 3 of those things I highly recommend it.
One of the most thorough and well written pieces of journalism (it reads like a book-length magazine feature) that I’ve ever encountered. The characters and company felt so alive.
klelatti
Author here (of the post not the book!)
A kind reader pointed me towards an interview with Dick Sonderegger who worked at Data General at time of the development of Eagle [1].
His view based on discussions with people who appeared in the book is interesting:
'They did not have flattering things to say about Tracy Kidder ... This is a historical novel, this is not what actually happened'.
'To a man [they said] he didn't know anything, we could have told him anything and he could have bought it. And reading the book that's accurate'
DG section is at approx 21 mins
ghaff
I don't know.
I worked at DG for 13 years (albeit a few years post-Eagle) and I've never heard anything along those lines. And the company liked the book as far as I can tell--they regularly gave copies away at the executive briefing center.
I have no doubt there were embellishments for the purposes of narrative. And people always have different takes on all sort of things that they participated in at a company. But I've never heard it was substantially inaccurate and I knew a number of people in "the book" pretty well.
klelatti
Thanks for sharing this.
I definitely didn't intend to endorse this view. I think if it was really true that they had purposely misled him and he'd taken it all in then there would be some major technical 'howlers' in the book. As far as I can see there aren't any.
Maybe they didn't like the way they were portrayed - which I can understand - and there was a collective, organic 'well of course it wasn't like that' soon after the book was published.
ghaff
Yeah, I was product manager for a number of subsequent 32-bit MV minicomputers and, later, a number of Unix-based systems including the big NUMA servers. It's been a while since I read the book but I certainly don't recall anything that caused me to go "That can't be right."
No first-hand knowledge of all the internal politics that shook out in the creation of the MV/8000 (Eagle) but, again, never heard anyone say it was BS and I knew many folks both in Westboro and RTP quite well.
I love books about writing/creating new software/hardware. One I can recommend, about Windows NT is: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Windows-Gene...
Does anyone here know about any book(s) on the VAX, or indeed on any of DEC's machines, or IBM's stuff (which were - probably still are - beautifully engineered) come to that? I'm aware of "Big Blue", but that is mostly about IBM business practices.