The Immortal Soul of an Old Machine

The best book ever written about IT work or the computer industry will be 40 years old in August. Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine describes the work of Data General engineers to prototype a minicomputer, codenamed "Eagle," intended to halt the advance of the Digital Equipment Corporation's hugely successful VAX range. It won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for non-fiction, perhaps the two highest honors available for book-length journalism. Year after year, the book continues to sell and win new fans. Developers born since it was published often credit it with shaping their career choices or helping them appreciate the universal aspects of their own experiences. Soul's appeal has endured, even though what started out as a dispatch from a fast-growing firm building a piece of the future now reads as a time capsule from a lost world. Back in 1991 I read the book for an undergraduate class, typing my paper on a PC that was already more capable than Eagle yet cost 100 times less. So why are so many people still excited to relive the creation of a pitifully obsolete computer, designed by a team of obscure engineers for a long-forgotten company that never mattered very much anyway? Having spent almost 30 years now trying to take the book apart and figure out how it works, I think I have some answers. Paradoxically, the obscurity of Data General helps to explain the book's enduring power.