The Soul of a New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

  Prologue: A GOOD MAN IN A STORM

  All the way to the horizon in the last light, the sea was just degrees of gray, rolling and frothy on the surface. From the cockpit of a small white sloop — she was thirty-five feet long — the waves looked like hills coming up from behind, and most of the crew preferred not to glance at them. There were no other boats in sight, but off to the south for a while they could see the reassuring outlines of the coast. Then it got dark. Running under shortened sails in front of the northeaster, the boat rocked one way, gave a thump, and then it rolled the other. The pots and pans in the galley clanged. A six-pack of beer, which someone had forgotten to stow away, slid back and forth across the cabin floor, over and over again. Sometime late that night, one of the crew raised a voice against the wind and asked, "What are we trying to prove?" All of them were adults. The owner and captain was a lawyer in his sixties. There were a psychologist and a physician and a professor, all of them in their late thirties, and also a man named Tom West. West was rather mysterious, being the merest acquaintance to one of them and a stranger to the others. They were bound for New York from Portland, Maine, on yachtsman's business, which is to say, primarily for sport. And when they had set sail in sheltered Casco Bay earlier that evening, decked out bravely in slickers and sou'westers, all of them had felt at least a little bit romantic. But when they cleared the lee of the land and entered the seaway, and the boat suddenly began to lurch, they grabbed the nearest sturdy railings and thought about their suppers, which by the time it got dark, several of them had lost.

  Most of the crew now fell into that half-autistic state that the monotony of storms at sea occasionally induces. You find a place to sit and getting a good hold of it, you try not to move again. The boat rolls this way and you flex the muscles around your stomach, then relax; she rolls that way and you flex again. Just staying in one place is exercise. For a while your mind may rebel: "Why did you come, idiot? You don't have to be out here." You may feel remorse for having cursed some part of life on land. After a time, though, phrases start falling from your memory — snatches of song or prayer or nursery rhymes — and you repeat them silently. A little shot of spray in the face, however, or an especially loud and dangerous-sounding thump from the hull, usually breaks the trance and puts you back at sea again. You feel like a lonely child. The ocean doesn't care about you. It makes your boat feel tiny. The oceans are great promoters of religion, or at least of humility — but not in everyone.

  In the glow of the running lights, most of the crew looked like refugees, huddled, wearing blank faces. Among them, Tom West appeared as a thin figure under a watch cap, in nearly constant motion. High spirits had apparently possessed him from the moment they set sail, and the longer they were out in the storm, the heavier the weather got, the livelier he grew. You could see him grinning in the dark. West did all that the captain asked, so cheerfully, unquestioningly and fast, that one might have thought the ghost of an old-fashioned virtuous seaman had joined them. Only West never confessed to a queasy stomach. When one of the others asked him if he felt seasick too, he replied, in a completely serious voice, that he would not let himself. A little later, he made his way down to the cabin, moving like a veteran conductor in a rocking, rolling railroad car, and got himself a beer. West was at the helm, the tiller in both hands, riding the waves; he was standing under a swaying lantern in the cabin studying the chart, he was nimbly climbing out onto the foredeck to wrestle in a jib and replace it with a smaller one. And when the captain decided to make for shelter, very late that night, at a little harbor with a passage into it that was twisty, narrow and full of tide, it was West, standing up in the bow, who spotted each unlighted channel marker and guided them safely in.

  By dawn, the wind had moderated slightly and everyone felt better. They went out and raised their spinnaker. West gazed up at the large billowing sail and said, "The spinnaker looks like a win." He said, "Hey, we're haulin' ass." There was something faintly ridiculous about his exclamations, but also something childlike that made his companions smile. He was grinning most of the day, a cockeyed little smile that collected in one corner of his mouth. When the captain remarked worriedly that his boat had never gone so fast before, West laughed. He made the sound mostly in his throat. It was a low and even noise. Odd in itself and oddly provoked, the kind of laughter that ghost stories inspire, it seemed to say, "Here's something that's not ordinary."

  A snapshot taken of the cockpit in the afternoon shows West sitting in the stern. The dark shadow of a day's growth of beard reveals that he passed adolescence some years ago, though just how many would be impossible to say. In fact, he is just forty. He wears glasses with flesh-colored rims, and a heavy gray sweater that must have given him long faithful service hangs loosely on his frame. He looks as if he must smell of wool. He looks thin, with a long narrow face that on a woman would be called horsey. A mane of brown hair, swept back behind his ears, reaches almost to his collar. His face is lifted, his lips pursed. He appears to be the person in command.

  One of the crew would remember being alone with him on watch one night. They were sailing under clear skies with a gentle breeze. Suddenly, at the slackening of the tide, the wind fell away, some clouds rolled in, and then just as suddenly, when the tide began to run, the sky cleared up and the breeze returned. In a low and throaty voice, West made exclamations: "Did you see that?" He made his low and spooky laugh. His companion was about to say, "Well, I've seen this happen before." The tone of West's voice prevented him, however. He thought it would be rude to describe this event as ordinary. Besides, West was right, wasn't he? It was strange and wonderful the way the pieces of the weather sometimes played in concert. At any rate, it was fun to think that they had just encountered a natural mystery, and, somewhat surprised at himself, West's companion suggested that events like that made superstitions seem respectable. West gave his low laugh, apparently signifying agreement.

  The psychologist, meanwhile, was waiting for West to go to sleep. He had not done so for more than a few hours altogether. By the third day, when they were sailing in sunshine with a gentle breeze, the psychologist expected to see signs of exhaustion appear in West. Instead, West put on his bathing suit and took a long vigorous swim beside the boat.

  Back at a restaurant near Portland before they'd gone out into the storm, while they'd been sharing the meal that most of them soon regretted, West had told them, "I build computers." Although he spoke at some length about certain extraordinary sounding, new computing systems, the others came away uncertain about what role, if any, he had played in their construction. They felt only that whatever he did for a living, it was probably interesting and obviously important.

  One time while West was manning the tiller, the psychologist asked him how he had learned to sail. West didn't answer. A little later on, thinking he hadn't heard the question, the psychologist inquired again.

  "You already asked me that," West snapped. After a moment's silence, he wet his lips and explained that he had taught himself mostly, as a boy.

  On another occasion, just to make conversation, one of the crew asked West what sort of computer he was building now. West made a face and looked away, and muttered something about how that was work and this was his vacation and he would rather not think about that.

  The people who shared the journey remembered West. The following winter, describing the nasty northeaster over dinner, the captain remarked, "That fellow West is a good man in a storm." The psychologist did not see West again, but remained curious about him. "He didn't sleep for four nights! Four whole nights. : And if that trip had been his idea of a vacation, where, the psychologist wanted to know, did he work?

  HOW TO MAKE A LOT OF MONEY

>   For a time after the first pieces of Route 495 were laid down across central Massachusetts, in the middle 1960's, the main hazard to drivers was deer. About fifteen years later, although traffic went by in processions, stretches of the highway's banks still looked lonesome. Driving down 495, you passed some modern buildings, but they quickly disappeared and then for a while there would be little to see except the odd farmhouse and acres of trees. The highway traverses some of the ghost country of rural Massachusetts. Like Troy, this region contains evidence of successive sackings: in the pine and hardwood forests, which now comprise two-thirds of the state, many cellar holes and overgrown stone walls that farmers left behind when they went west; riverside textile mills, still the largest buildings in many little towns, but their windows broken now, their machinery crumbling to rust and the business gone to Asia and down south. However, on many of the roads that lead back behind the highway's scenery stand not woods and relics, but brand-new neighborhoods, apartment houses, and shopping centers. The roads around them fill up with cars before nine and after five. They are going to and from commercial buildings that wear on their doors and walls descriptions of new enterprise. Digital Equipment, Data General — there on the edge of the woods, those names seemed like prophecies to me, before I realized that the new order they implied had arrived already.

  A few miles north of the junction of Route 495 and the Massachusetts Turnpike, off an access road, sits a two-story brick building, surrounded by parking lots. A sign warns against leaving a car there without authority. The building itself looks like a fort. It has narrow windows, an American flag on a pole out front, a dish antenna on a latticed tower. Mounted on several corners of the roofs, and slowly turning, are little TV cameras.

  This is Building A/B — 14B was fastened seamlessly to I4A. Some employees call the place "Webo," but most refer to it as "Westborough," after the name of the town inside whose borders the building happens to exist. "Westborough" is worldwide headquarters of the Data General Corporation. Driving up to the building one day with one of the company's public relations men, I asked, "Who was the architect?"

  "We didn't have one!" cried the beaming press agent.

  Company engineers helped to design Westborough, and they made it functional and cheap. One contractor who did some work for Data General was quoted in Fortune as saying, "What they call tough auditing, we call thievery." However they accomplished it, Westborough cost only about nineteen dollars a square foot at a time when the average commercial building in Massachusetts was going for something like thirty-four dollars a foot. But looks do matter here. The company designed Westborough not just for the sake of thriftiness, but also to make plain to investors and financial analysts that Data General really is a thrifty outfit, "There's no reason in our business to have an ostentatious display," a company analyst for investor relations explained. "In fact, it's detrimental."

  The TV cameras on the roofs, the first defense against unscrupulous competitors and other sorts of spies and thieves, must comfort those who have a stake in what goes on inside. As for me, I imagined that somewhere in the building men in uniforms were watching me arrive, and I felt discouraged from walking on the grass.

  The only door that opens for outsiders leads to the front lobby. A receptionist asks you to sign a logbook, which inquires if you are an American citizen, wants your license plate number, and so on. Still you cannot pass the desk and enter the hallways beyond — not until the employee you want to see comes out and gives you escort. When I inquired, the cheerful young receptionist said that once in a great while some outsider would try to break the rules and try to slip inside.

  The lobby could belong to a motor inn. It has orange carpeting and some chairs and a sofa upholstered in vinyl, on which salesmen and would-be employees languish, awaiting appointments. Now and then, a visitor will stand and gaze into a plastic case. It contains the bare bones of a story that will feed the dreams of any ambitious businessman. The First NOVA, reads a legend on the case. Inside sits a small computer, about the size of a suitcase, with a cathode-ray tube — a thing like a television screen — beside it. A swatch of prose on the back wall, inside the case, explains that this was the first computer that Data General ever sold. But the animal in there isn't stuffed; the computer is functioning, lights on it softly blinking as it produces on the screen beside it a series of graphs — ten years' worth of annual reports, a precis of Data General Corporation's financial history.

  Left to their own devices, the engineers who worked in the basement of Building 14A/B could surely have produced a flashier display, but a visitor from Wall Street who had never paid attention to this company before might have felt faint before the thing. The TV screen was blue. The graphs, etched in white, appeared in rotating sequence, and each one bore a name. "Cumulative Computers Shipped Since Our Founding" started with 100 in 1969 and went right up to 70,700 in 1979. The image vanished. "Net Sales" appeared, to show that revenues had ascended without a hitch from nothing in 1968 to $507.5 million in 1979. That graph went away and in its place came one describing profit margins. These hardly varied. The profits just rolled in, year after year, along a nearly straight line, at about 20 percent (before taxes) of those burgeoning net sales.

  Someone unaccustomed to reading financial reports might have missed the full import of the numbers on the screen, the glee and madness in them. But anyone could see that they started small and got big fast. Mechanically, monotonously, the computer in the case was telling an old familiar story — the international, materialistic fairy tale come true.

  The first modern computers arrived in the late 1940s, and although many more or less single-handed contributions fostered the technology, they did so mainly in the shade of a familiar association in America among the military, universities and corporations. On the commercial side, IBM quickly established worldwide hegemony; it brought to computers the world's best sales force, all dressed in white shirts and blue suits. For some years the computer industry consisted almost exclusively of IBM and several smaller companies — "IBM and the seven dwarfs," business writers liked to say. Then in the 1960's IBM produced a family of new computers, called the 360 line. It was a daring corporate undertaking. "We're betting the company," one IBM executive remarked. Indeed, the project cost somewhat more than the development of the atom bomb, but it paid off handsomely. It guaranteed for a long time to come IBM's continued preeminence in the making of computers for profit. Meanwhile, though, new parts of the business were growing up, and out from under IBM.

  In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer's power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though subtlety went into its design. It did mainly bookkeeping and math, by rote procedures, and it did them far more quickly than they had ever been done before. But computers were relatively scarce, and they were large and very expensive. Typically, one big machine served an entire organization. Often it lay behind a plate glass window, people in white gowns attending it, and those who wished to use it did so through intermediaries. Users were like supplicants. The process could be annoying.

  Scientists and engineers, it seems, were the first to express a desire for a relatively inexpensive computer that they could operate themselves. The result was a machine called a minicomputer. In time, the demand for such a machine turned out to be enormous. Probably IBM could not have controlled this new market, the way it did the one for large computers. As it happened, IBM ignored it, and so the field was left open for aspiring entrepreneurs — often, in this case, young computer engineers who left corporate armies with dreams of building corporate armies of their own.

  For many years sociologists and others have written of a computer revolution, impending or in progress. Some enthusiasts have declared that the small inexpensive computer inaugurated a new phase of this upheaval, which would make computers instruments of egalitarianism. By the late seventies, practically every organization in America
had come to rely upon computers, and ordinary citizens were buying them for their homes. Within some organizations small bands of professionals had exercised absolute authority over computing, and the proliferation of small computers did weaken their positions. But in the main, computers altered techniques and not intentions and in many cases served to increase the power of executives on top and to prop up venerable institutions. A more likely place to look for radical change was inside the industry actually producing computers. Generally, that industry grew very big and lively, largely because of a single invention.

  Shortly after World War II, decades of investigation into the internal workings of the solids yielded a new piece of electronic hardware called a transistor (for its actual invention, three scientists at Bell Laboratories won the Nobel Prize). Transistors, a family of devices, alter and control the flow of electricity in circuits; one standard rough analogy compares their action to that of faucets controlling the flow of water in pipes. Other devices then in existence could do the same work, but transistors are superior. They are solid. They have no cogs and wheels, no separate pieces to be soldered together; it is as if they are stones performing useful work. They are durable, take almost no time to start working, and don't consume much power. Moreover, as physicists and engineers discovered, they could be made very small, indeed microscopic, and they could be produced cheaply in large quantities.

  The second crucial stage in the development of the new electronics came when techniques were developed to hook many transistors together into complicated circuits — into little packets called integrated circuits, or chips (imagine the wiring diagram of an office building, inscribed on the nail of your little toe). The semiconductor industry, which is named for the class of solids out of which transistors are made, grew up around these devices and began producing chips in huge quantities. Chips made spaceships and pocket calculators possible. They became the basic building blocks of TVs, radios, stereos, watches, and they made computers ubiquitous and varied. They did not eliminate the sizable, expensive computer; they made it possible for the likes of IBM to produce machines of increased speed and capability and still make handsome profits without raising prices much. At the same time, the development of chips fostered an immense and rapid growth of other kinds of computing machines.