What is The Soul of a New Machine about?

Tracy Kidder's account of the engineers at Data General Corporation who designed a new minicomputer under enormous competitive pressure in the late 1970s won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1982 and effectively invented the genre of technology-company narrative journalism. Published in 1981, it remains the clearest account of what it actually feels like to make something new under deadline — and of what organizations do to, and with, people who care intensely about their work.

The book follows Tom West, a veteran Data General engineer, and the two teams he assembled — the Hardy Boys (experienced engineers) and the Microkids (recent college graduates) — who built the Eclipse MV/8000, a 32-bit minicomputer that Data General needed to compete with Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX. The project was officially invisible within Data General — a skunkworks operating below the company's official radar — which meant that the team had no formal resources and depended entirely on West's ability to protect them from organizational interference while also covertly obtaining what they needed.

Kidder embedded with the team for more than a year, and the resulting portrait is as much psychological as technical. The engineers he profiles — West himself, a complex man of suppressed intensity; Carl Alsing, the recruiter who built the team; Jonathan Raskin, a Microkid who signed on with little understanding of what he was committing to — are rendered as full people with inner lives, relationships, and private doubts. The work is rendered in sufficient technical detail to convey its difficulty without requiring the reader to be an engineer.

The book raises questions about organizational commitment and individual cost that remain relevant forty years later. The engineers worked hundred-hour weeks, sacrificed relationships and health, and received relatively modest compensation for their efforts. Many quit Data General shortly after the machine shipped. Kidder does not moralize about this; he describes it with precision and leaves the reader to draw conclusions. The "mushroom treatment" — keeping the team in the dark and feeding them manure — is his wry description of what West's management style required.