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.