BOOK REPORT:The Soul of A New Machine

BOOK NAME:The Soul of A New Machine

 

AUTHOR:Tracy Kidder

 

`The Soul of a New Machine' is a landmark journalistic book-length essay by then

 `Atlantic Monthly' writer, Tracy Kidder exploring the development of a new computer

 in those pre-microcomputer days of 1978.

 

The book is a narrative of what was used to be modern technology, where the central

processing units (CPU) or `brains of commercial minicomputers and mainframe

computers were built up on large circuit boards from individual, specialized integrated

circuit chips, with each chip integrating dozens or hundreds of discrete components.

This compares to today's microcomputers where the entire CPU is placed on a single

chip incorporating tens of thousands of discrete functions, all taking up no more room

than the average credit card. Now, the book is more a history of how this technology

was developed, and yet its picture of how people work in teams developing technological

projects will probably never go out of date.

 

The irony of this book is that the computer being developed by the team described

in this book, a 32 bit Eclipse computer developed by the Data General corporation,

a competitor to the larger and very successful Digital Computer Corporation (Digital),

did not really achieve any major breakthrough in technology. While it was intended

to compete with a new generation of Digital VAX machines, it ended up being just

barely faster than VAX's in a few special tasks. Some Digital engineers says that

when they went head to head with Data General in bidding for a computer sale, the

only thing they had to do was bring out Kidder's book to demonstrate that the Data

General box was yesterday's news. Data General may have had the last laugh, as ailing

Digital was bought out by Compaq, which has since merged with H-P, further

submerging the once great Digital presence in the commercial computer world.

Meanwhile, Data General is still around, albeit not the presence it once had when

the `minicomputer' was the great alternative to the IBM monoliths in the glass houses.

 

That does not detract from the fact that this is still a terrific story. My favorite image

is of the engineer who quit the project to become a farmer, so that the smallest unit

of time he had to deal with was the season. My second favorite quote is that the

management style on the project was the mushroom theory.

 

As I see from Kidder's introduction, this essay was a bigger accomplishment that

it seemed originally, as Kidder was closer to being a Luddite than he was a techie

 in love with the latest computer tool which, at that time, would have been standalone

word processing machines produced by companies such as IBM and Wang. In spite

of that limitation, he manages to make it interesting to both the average reader and

someone like myself who is familiar with the inner workings of computers.

 

So, this is not only a history of a major moment in computer history, it is a superb

picture of the dynamics of people in technical development teams and the challenges

of achieving a technical goal.

转载于:https://www.cnblogs.com/caozhu1/archive/2011/05/28/2060551.html