The Soul of a New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

  When engineers finished a project and word of approval came down from the offices of the executives and the various arms of the company got ready to announce the machine to the world that spends so lavishly on computing equipment, then the Marketing Department would usually hand out to each person who had helped to create the new computer a framed photograph of it. Several of these sorts of pictures hung in West's office. West had a saying: "The game around here is getting a machine out the door with your name on it." One of the photographs on his wall showed a model of Data General's first Eclipse computer, and, apropos of his remark, printed on the machine was a list of eight names. West's was among them and so was Carl Alsing's. An identical photograph hung in Alsing's cubicle.

  The same image, of that first Eclipse, also sat on a windowsill in an office at another computer company. It belonged to an engineer who had worked for Data General back in the days when the Eclipse was being built. The picture was just a photo of an immobile plastic box, but the former Data General engineer gazed at it, and he smiled. "It was a lot of fun, a lot of pressure. With the Eclipse there was a tremendous amount of team spirit. We were going twenty-four hours a day debugging that prototype, breathing on it hard to make it come to life.

  "West did do an awful lot of the debugging. I would say he's an excellent engineer. I really think that Tom was very much of a problem solver. It was decided that the Eclipse should have error- correction code. What was that? There wasn't that much written about it at that time. Tom went and learned about it and came up with how to do it. Some reports I hear about Tom — I hear that he's very different in a management role. I hear in his management role he's a very tough guy, very closed, but he was an easygoing guy then, though hardworking.

  "Tom used to have these all-day picnics at his house. He'd roast a pig, there'd be a keg of beer. He was a hell of a nice guy! I enjoyed him a lot."

  Many people recalled West's annual pig roasts. Enough people attended, said another old friend, that the odds lay in favor of a child being born during the fete, and the guest list included painters and writers, musicians, footloose young folks and also computer people. West is remembered, his face all lit up, moving among the throng, surveying his wide and disparate acquaintance. "He was so happy and funny and warmhearted," said another regular at the roasts.

  West came to Data General in 1974, joining Carl Alsing and the other engineers who were attempting to bring the first Eclipse to life. To Alsing, West appeared to be just a good, competent circuit designer, but strikingly adept at finding and fixing the flaws in a computer. "A great debugger," Alsing considered him. "He was so fast in the lab I felt I was barely adequate to hold the probes of the oscilloscope for him." Alsing took a shine to his new colleague almost at once. The morning after an Eclipse Group party, he and West, on the spur of the moment, took a trip to Provincetown on Cape Cod. Alsing was amazed at how easily West found his way among strangers and how he seemed to be able to identify the most interesting bars by just glancing through their doorways. West possessed that town for an evening, as if he'd lived there all his life and were showing Alsing around.

  One time Alsing stayed up all night in a lab programming a batch of ROMs, or "read-only memory" chips. West found Alsing still at this work the next morning, and laughing, he cried out: "Alsing! You're a ROM-driven man!" Then West made up a song by that title to the tune of "John Henry." West was always inventing catchy expressions, and "ROM-driven" was Alsing's favorite. The contents of a ROM, once programmed into the chip, cannot be altered or erased; the information can only be "read." ROM-driven: it opens up the ancient question of predestination and free will. Later, Alsing would wonder how the phrase applied to his friend. So would West himself, apparently, for one day downstairs, during the Eagle project, he would ask — laughing his nervous-sounding laugh, not the hearty one of the pig roasts — "Doesn't anything around here happen by accident?"

  From West, Alsing was able to glean only a few biographical facts: that he had gone to Amherst College, majoring in physics there; that he had worked for the Smithsonian Institution afterward, building digital clocks, among other things, and traveling a lot; that he had quit that job just like that, after seven years, and had virtually taught himself computer engineering while working for RCA. There was a little more: West's father was an important man, one of the most senior executives of AT&T; West had a wife and daughters; West played the guitar well, and personally knew many famous folksingers. Alsing listened to his stories. West told him that one night, while he was traveling through Mozambique on business for the Smithsonian, he got out of a Landrover and yelled into the darkness: "Massachusetts! Massachusetts!"

  "I thought someone might hear me," West explained, "and someday there'd be a bunch of kids running around out there named Massachusetts."

  Alsing clapped his hands and laughed and laughed. He always wanted to hear more.

  West had been to places that Alsing never dreamed he himself would visit. Alsing could not help envying him a little, not least of all because West seemed so free. West was, to Alsing then, like that mysterious stranger just passing through town. West told him about quitting his job with the Smithsonian on the spur of the moment, and of a troupe of latter-day gypsies — a band of youngsters on the roam who had camped in a field near his house. Alsing was left feeling that if those gypsies passed through town again, West might go away with them. When West talked about his music, Alsing got the same feeling; he fully expected to come to work some morning and find that West had departed for good, most likely without leaving a forwarding address, and the idea charmed Alsing — and also made him feel a little sad, of course. But it didn't turn out that way. When the first Eclipse went to market and the group's original leader began to take leave, in order to work on FHP, West asked that he be given command of the team. West seemed to Alsing the logical choice for the job: "He was the smartest guy around." But Alsing was very surprised that West wanted the position.

  As Alsing remembered, West was told in effect that it was out of the question. West had been asked weeks before to design a piece of equipment called an IOP, and he had not done a lick of work on it yet. What made him think he could run the Eclipse Group?

  West went into his office then and closed his door for about seven weeks.

  West and Alsing usually went out for coffee in the middle of the morning, but not now.

  Alsing poked his head into West's office. "Coffee, Tom?"

  "Go away, Carl," West replied.

  Alsing tried on another day. Without looking up from his work, West said, in a flat, calm voice, "Get out, Alsing."

  Alsing sensed that there was nothing personal in these rebuffs, and he found it impossible to get angry at West. After seven weeks, West emerged, the completed design for the IOP in his hands. Little by little after that, he assumed command of the Eclipse Group. Reflecting some years later on those seven weeks of West's labor, Alsing said: "The day Tom went into his office to do the IOP was the day he started getting tough. I think it was the day when he started to care."

  Over the next several years, successive generations of engineers joining the group would know less of West than their predecessors had, until finally, by the time of Eagle, new recruits would know almost nothing about him at all. They'd know nothing of pig roasts; that custom had lapsed. Their view of West would be restricted mainly to chance encounters in hallways. West would come down a corridor dragging the knuckles of one hand along the wall, and often he would pass right by members of his own team, without, it seemed, even noticing them. For their part, most gave up trying to greet him. The distant, angry look on his face warned against it.

  Occasionally, some of the Eclipse Group wondered about their leader.

  "We've heard that he worked for the CIA."

  "Wasn't he a folksinger?"

  "A lot of guys think he's a speed freak."

  "West," said one young engineer, "is a prince of darkness."

  He had changed. There was no denying tha
t Though remaining as close to him as anyone in the basement, Alsing rarely saw him after work anymore. Almost no one from Westborough did, it seemed. West was Alsing's boss now; that was part of it. But he wasn't as obviously happy and merry as he had been, and his jokes, though Alsing still found them witty, tended now toward the sardonic. He'd smile with one side of his mouth, whereas he used to grin with all of it. Every so often, Alsing did see flashes of the old West. This was true especially in West's campaign after EGO, his assiduous canvassing for Eagle, his successful attempt to rouse various parts of the basement from depression. To be sure, most of the humor and merriment was still missing, and this fellow of formerly eclectic passions now seemed completely singleminded; but West's campaign reminded Alsing of their adventure years before in Provincetown. West rarely lent his enthusiasm to "someone else's trip," Alsing noted. "But if it's his own or he makes it his own ..."

  West still had a way of making ordinary things seem special; in this case a 32-bit Eclipse was being transformed into the occasion for an adventure. West's ardor for it seemed to spread the way his neologies did. Others besides Alsing felt infected.

  For Rosemarie Seale, the main excitement began after EGO was canceled and everyone but West seemed ready to pack it in. "Tom's obviously made some decision which I know nothing about," she said. "He's decided he isn't gonna take his bat and ball and go home." Later, she would say: "I wanted to work for him. I could have gotten more pay elsewhere. I didn't understand it all, but I knew I wanted to work for him. I wanted to be part of that effort."

  Rosemarie is a petite, brown-haired woman in her middle years. She speaks rapidly and punctuates most statements with a quick, low laugh which makes it seem as though she's chuckling while she talks. "I grew up in a poor family, in Depression times. I went to secretarial school in Boston. I brought up a family. I got divorced. I traveled a bit. I was a stupid, ignorant girl when I was young, and I think I've learned a few things, but probably not many." In 1976 Rosemarie was working for an insurance company, supervising the underwriting files, a job that held her interest for exactly one month. The files had been a mess, but once she'd gotten them cleaned up, the work became completely routine. Then she saw a help-wanted ad for Data General in a newspaper. It asked:

  ARE YOU BORED?

  "It was speaking to me!"

  She was assigned to the Eclipse Group, which was tiny then and had never had a secretary. The engineers "found" her a desk, as she put it. She opened the team's lone filing cabinet and found nothing in it, except for a couple of rolls of toilet paper. No list of the group's members existed. She went from one engineer to another, asking, "Do you have any idea who you work for?" It was the beginning of a long romance.

  To Rosemarie, the Eagle project was like a gift. She had so much to do every day: budgets to prepare, battles to fight with one department or another, mail to sort when the mailroom was untimely moved, phones to answer, documents to prepare, paychecks to find and deliver on time, the newcomers to attend to ("Would they have a place to sit — and the conditions weren't the best, you know — and would they have a pencil?")- Each day brought another small administrative crisis. "I was doing something important," she said.

  Rosemarie did not always realize that she was having a good time, of course. Having trained all the team's newcomers to tie their shoes, in an administrative sense, she began to feel that they regarded her as a surrogate mother, which annoyed her, until she decided: "You are what you are. I might as well enjoy that, too." She always hated answering the phones, though. Once in a while she even talked about quitting. Sympathizing, Alsing once asked her why she didn't just do it.

  "I can't leave," she answered. She flashed a furtive grin at Alsing, and nodding her head toward West's office door, she said, in a lowered voice: "It's like one of those terrible movies. I just have to see how it comes out. I just have to see what Tom's gonna do next."

  So there was another watcher. Alsing was delighted.

  Convinced that Eagle would be a wart, a bag, a kludge — and suspicious that it would go the way of EGO and Victor — some of the brightest hardware engineers around expressed no interest in joining the project. Others went along, some reluctantly at first, and by the very early spring of 1978 West had gathered the makings of a team. He had Rosemarie and Alsing and about a dozen other experienced engineers, who had worked for him before. For a time West thought that their numbers would suffice, but really they were just a cadre. It became obvious, when they started designing the "logic" of the new machine, that such a tiny group would never be able to produce a computer like this in a year. "We need more bodies," said West to Alsing, and Alsing agreed.

  North Carolina's leaders had assembled a large crew mainly by luring experienced engineers away from Westborough and other companies. But around this time videotape was circulating in the basement, and it suggested another approach. In the movie, an engineer named Seymour Cray described how his little company, located in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, had come to build what are generally acknowledged to be the fastest computers in the world, the quintessential number-crunchers. Cray was a legend in computers, and in the movie Cray said that he liked to hire inexperienced engineers right out of school, because they do not usually know what's supposed to be impossible. West liked that idea. He also realized, of course, that new graduates command smaller salaries than experienced engineers. Moreover, using novices might be another way in which to disguise his team's real intentions. Who would believe that a bunch of completely inexperienced engineers could produce a major CPU to rival North Carolina's?

  "Shall we hire kids, Alsing?" said West.

  For a couple of weeks he and Alsing discussed the idea. To make it work they'd have to hire the very best new engineers they could find, ones who would know more about the state of the art in computers than they did. They told each other that they'd have to be sure not to turn away candidates just because the youngsters made them feel old and obsolete; on the contrary, those were the candidates they'd have to welcome. Smiling, West allowed that if they did this, they might be hiring their own replacements — their own assassins. Even if they did hire prodigies, of course, the scheme might not work. Maybe you couldn't build a major CPU with kids. It was awfully risky. It was a compelling idea.

  Between the summer of 1978 and the fall of that year, West's team roughly doubled in size. To the dozen or so old hands — old in a relative sense — were added about a dozen neophytes, fresh from graduate schools of electrical engineering and computer science. These newcomers were known as "the kids." West was the boss, and he had a sort of adjutant — an architect of the electronic school — and two main lieutenants, each of whom had a sublieutenant or two. One lieutenant managed the crew that worked on the hardware, the machine's actual circuitry, and the members of this crew were called, and called themselves, "the Hardy Boys." The other main part of the team worked on micro code, a synaptic language that would fuse the physical machine with the programs that would tell it what to do. To join this part of the group, which Alsing ran, was to become one of "the Micro- kids." There were also a draftsman and some technicians. The group's numbers changed from time to time, generally diminishing, as people dropped out. But usually they totaled about thirty.

  How was it to be one of "the kids"? You were in no danger of being fired, but you didn't know that, and besides, when you are brand-new in a job you want to make a good impression right from the start. So you set out to get to know your boss, as Hardy Boy Dave Epstein did. You walk into his office and say, "Hi, I'm Dave," and you begin to extend your hand. Epstein would never forget that experience: "West just sat there and stared at me. After a few seconds, I decided I'd better get out of there."

  Going to work for the Eclipse Group could be a rough way to start out in your profession. You set out for your first real job with all the loneliness and fear that attend new beginnings, drive east from Purdue or Northwestern or Wisconsin, up from Missouri or west from MIT, and before you've learned to find
your way to work without a road map, you're sitting in a tiny cubicle or, even worse, in an office like the one dubbed the Micropit, along with three other new recruits, your knees practically touching theirs; and though lacking all privacy and quiet, though it's a job you've never really done before, you are told that you have almost no time at all in which to master a virtual encyclopedia of technical detail and to start producing crucial pieces of a crucial new machine. And you want to make a good impression. So you don't have any time to meet women, to help your wife buy furniture for your apartment, or to explore the unfamiliar countryside. You work. You're told, "Don't even mention the name Eagle outside the group." "Don't talk outside the group," you're told. You're working at a place that looks like something psychologists build for testing the fortitude of small animals, and your boss won't even say hello to you New and old hands told the same story. Chuck Holland; "I can hardly say I do anything else now. It takes about three days to get Eagle out of my mind, so if you have a three-day weekend, you're just sorry to see Monday come." Microkid Betty Shanahan, the group's lone female engineer: "You can end up staying all night. You can forget to go home and eat dinner. My husband complained that the last three times he's had to do the laundry." Jon Blau: "I've had difficulty forming sentences lately. In the middle of a story my mind'll go blank. Pieces of your life get dribbled away. I'm growing up, having all those experiences, and I don't want to shut them out for the sake of Data General or this big project." Jim Guyer, a Hardy Boy and an old hand at age twenty-six, said; "I like my job, it's great, I enjoy it. But it's not what I do for recreation. Outside of work, I do other things, like rock-climbing and hiking." Guyer paused. A thought had just occurred to him. "I haven't done any of that lately. Because I've been working too much."

  But where did the relish in their voices come from?

  At the start of the project, a newcomer could expect to earn something like $20,000 a year, while a veteran such as Alsing might make a little more than $30,000—and those figures grew enormously at Data General and elsewhere over the next few years. But they received no extra pay for working overtime. The old hands had also received some stock options, but most seemed to view the prospect of stock as a mere sweetener, and most agreed with Ken Holberger, sublieutenant of Hardy Boys, who declared, "I don't work for money."