The Soul Of A New Machine - Tracy Kidder

This picture of the team that built Data General's Eagle minicomputer was taken in March 1980, a few weeks before the machine shipped under its market name, the MV/8000. - Wired magazine

This Pulitzer prize-winning book takes you to the heart of a team building a 'minicomputer'  (the size of a fridge rather than a large room) in the late 1970s at Data General in Massachusetts. Ancient history, almost. But the drama is timeless and the author is able to translate the not-insignificant engineering challenges into English, making for a great read. 

More than a simple catalog of events or stale corporate history, Soul lays bare the life of the modern engineer - the egghead toiling and tinkering in the basement, forsaking a social life for a technical one. It's a glimpse into the mysterious motivations, the quiet revelations, and the spectacular devotions of engineers - and, in particular, of West. Here is the project's enigmatic, icy leader, the man whom one engineer calls the "prince of darkness," but who quietly and deliberately protects his team and his machine. Here is the raw conflict of a corporate environment, factions clawing for resources as West shields his crew from the political wars of attrition fought over every circuit board and mode bit. Here are the power plays, the passion, and the burnout - the inside tale of how it all unfolded.

Over two decades, Soul has endured as the high tech story by which all others are judged. "It was the first book to describe the inner workings of the technology groups,"says Novell CEO Eric Schmidt, "and it did a good job of getting into the psychology of leadership. The corporate maneuvering was both fascinating and abhorrent to me."

Soul demanded that followers of technology thereafter see their subject with a new, astute eye. "I had never read such a book covering the work of engineers," says Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. "The readers got to 'live' with these engineers for a while. It's easy to consider engineers inhuman and hackers dangerous threats when you don't know them. I was very sad at the end, that the engineers were not better-respected and marketing folks here were credited with the computer." The engineer as artist, scientist, visionary; the computer builder as protagonist, even celebrity - these cultural figures came into being in Kidder's Soul and provided a new framework for understanding the progress of the industry.

The MV/8000