The Soul of a New Machine

You open expecting circuit boards and get a sailboat off the New England coast. "Without ever mentioning a computer you start to wonder if you picked up the wrong book," one reader says of that first chapter, and the misdirection is the method: Tom West arrives as a character before his machine does. An admirer swears "pipelining is explained so well, I bet my grandma would even understand it," and the chapter readers keep naming, "The Case of the Missing NAND Gate," runs down an intermittent logic failure with every engineer hoping the bug is not hiding in his own design. What stays is the year itself: "feeling constantly on the cusp of failure and that nothing is working, and looking up to notice a nearly-built, whole computer."

Strip off the sailboat prose and look at what Kidder is celebrating: twelve to sixteen hour days, six days a week, unpaid, in a windowless basement where the air conditioning got fixed only after the engineers went on strike. "What the book describes is semi-voluntary slavery," one detractor writes. Another: "It chews up 22-24 year old kids, and spits them out at 30, burnouts who had great potential, but were consumed by their jobs." All that to save a company that "ultimately accomplished nothing of any lasting consequence before finally disappearing into EMC." The worst part came later, a reader argues: "a lot of the love for a project like this one became the go-to idea that eventually fueled much that is worst in the tech industry."