The senior member of this skeleton crew is a designer named Tom West, whose prickly demeanor befits his role as leader of the slighted, angry engineers left behind. Meanwhile, back at its Massachusetts office, a small group of employees who refuse to uproot their families are tasked with maintaining Data General’s existing products. Known internally as the Fountainhead Project, this new department becomes ground zero for Data General’s single-minded efforts to take down the VAX, consuming the majority of the firm’s resources, attention, and talent. Desperate to build its own 32-bit machine and spurred on by a tax dispute with the state government, Data General relocates most of its operation from Westborough, Massachusetts to a new facility in North Carolina. A small but significant player in the industry, Data General begins to see its sales plummet after longtime market leader DEC releases the state-of-the-art 32-bit VAX computer. About the size of a closet and costing up to $25,000 apiece, minicomputers are precursors to the desktop PCs that would dominate the 1990s. When the book begins in the late 1970s, Data General is one of a small group of firms fighting for a share of the burgeoning “minicomputer” industry. Meanwhile, Kidder’s characterization of computer engineers as bold and passionate visionaries transcended the era’s prevailing clichés about “tech geeks” and forever transformed the way society views the computing industry. The team’s model for success would influence countless upstarts in Silicon Valley, for better or worse. Led by a cold, demanding boss and faced with severe budget and manpower constraints, the engineers work under grueling conditions to deliver a machine that outperforms the computing products made by bigger and better-funded competitors. Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine (1981) is a nonfiction account of a team of underdog engineers who build a state-of-the-art minicomputer despite tremendous odds.

The soul of a new machine