'"Alsing's rosy assessment, however, didn't hold for the duration of West's tenure. Their machines are getting long in the tooth; programs are bumping up against the memory limit of the 16-bit architecture.
Then again, that's how the best engineering efforts often take shape. At the end of the day, when it came out, the Eagle saved Data General - but Data General was never The machine, officially named the Eclipse MV/8000, was announced to the public in April 1980, in an afternoon ceremony in New York City. This is the true story of a small team of people with a common goal - to give birth to a new computer that will save a company. His thoughtful, prescient book, The Soul of a New Machine, tells stories of 35-year-old "veteran" engineers hiring recent college graduates and encouraging them to work harder and faster on complex and difficult projects, exploiting the youngsters' ignorance of normal scheduling processes while engendering a new kind of work ethic.
View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 1997 Vinyl release of The Soul Of A New Machine on Discogs. He went into what he calls semi-retirement (working only 40-hour weeks), dabbling in venture capital, consulting for the government's ASCI supercomputer projects, and serving on the Clinton administration's IT Advisory Committee.Last year, when a friend from the venture world told him about Chiaro, a startup developing next-generation optical switches, he jumped at the chance to play a little pinball. "Ken and I struck out into the deep West," says Holland, describing the pioneer spirit of their early startup efforts. Others suspect the Eagle project and its aftermath, in which West ended up divorced, may have drained his energy. Four years later, he jumped to a small startup and began developing optical character recognition technology. The blog post criticized EA's labor practices at the time, which required employees to work massive amounts of unpaid overtime, as they were salaried employees. Kidder, at 54, is at work on his fifth book since Even without an accompanying Hollywood blockbuster, the book has seen remarkable success. Which was mostly to get rid of them. Tracy can't tell you. From its tortured beginnings, the project was layered with the tangible intensity of twentysomething engineers racing against the clock to save the company.
Steve Wallach is sure that it was in West's genes - his father and grandfather both spent their whole careers at AT&T. "But it's a lot more fun to dig ditches where nobody else has dug one before."
I'd recommend this book to anyone that enjoys computer history. And with Kidder's able help, we are right there with them.
Written in 1981, it chronicles the building of a 32-bit microcomputer at Data General. In 10 years, you really are obsolete. For more than a decade, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the world-renowned astrophysicist and host of the popular radio and Emmy-nominated televi...The computer revolution brought with it new methods of getting work done—just look at today's news for reports of hard-driven, highly-motivated young software and online commerce developers who sacrifice evenings and weekends to meet impossible deadlines. The tools are gone, the vocabulary is different. And then when that activity ends and they leave the company or get laid off, they have no skills. "And you'll age four. June 1st 2000 Tracy Kidder got a preview of this world in the late 1970s when he observed the engineers of Data General design and buThe computer revolution brought with it new methods of getting work done—just look at today's news for reports of hard-driven, highly-motivated young software and online commerce developers who sacrifice evenings and weekends to meet impossible deadlines. Nestled into a wicker rocking chair, among his framed maritime charts and teetering piles of sailing books, Tom West could easily pass for a salty old sea captain. Since the mid-'80s, he has bounced around small companies in the OCR industry, mostly by choice and occasionally by downsizing. Close this message to accept … But we are not made to feel bad for the men who sacrifice 2 years of their lives to this white-whale. "More than a simple catalog of events or stale corporate history, Of course, the book was only a snapshot of the lives of its characters, most of whom are now, at mid-career, in their forties and fifties. ""He got the shaft," concludes Wallach matter-of-factly. Tracy Kidder writes it in a way that such a dry subject reads like an epic adventure, describing the engineers with so much detail that they feel like the heroes of said adventure. He breaks down the complex technical nature of the task through a series of straightforward analogies and by doing so enables us to follow the human struggle of these mistreated engineers, who, driven by manipulation and pride work mad hours with little benefit to themselves to breathe life into a machine of their very own.