The Soul of a New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

  Some of the recruits said they liked the atmosphere. Microkid Dave Keating, for instance, had looked at other companies, where de facto dress codes were in force. He liked the "casual" look of the basement of Westborough. "The jeans and so on." Several talked about their "flexible hours." "No one keeps track of the hours we work," said Ken Holberger. He grinned. "That's not altruism on Data General's part. If anybody kept track, they'd have to pay us a hell of a lot more than they do." Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing.

  A couple of the Microkids were chatting. They talked about the jobs they had turned down.

  "At IBM we wouldn't have gotten on a project this good. They don't hand out projects like this to rookies."

  "They don't hand out projects like this to rookies anywhere but Data General."

  "I got an offer at IBM to work on a memory chip, to see what could be done about improving its performance. Here I got an offer to work on a major new machine, which was gonna be the backbone of company sales. I'd get to do computer design. It wasn't hard to make that choice."

  Bob Beauchamp, another Microkid, had come from Missouri. He wore a small red beard. He was perhaps the most easygoing of the recruits. He had wider experience of the world than most, having taken a year off from school to play in a traveling rock band. Beauchamp seemed to be one of those fortunate souls: likable, modest, good-looking and smart. He had compiled an unblemished, straight-A average in graduate school. "I tended to enjoy takin' tests through school. I kinda like to measure myself," he said. "I'd spent five years in college learning, never really doing anything. When I got to Data General, I figured it was time to do something; and also I was new to this part of the world, and by myself, and even on weekends I didn't have a whole lot better to do. I might as well pass the time at work." But Beauchamp had opted to work on a part of the project that turned out to have a low priority. "There was no pressure. I felt out of the mainstream of things. There was intensity in the air. I kinda liked the fervor and I wanted to be part of it." Eventually, a suggestion came down that Beauchamp go to work on some of the machine's microcode. He was essentially offered the chance for some grueling work, and he accepted with alacrity. "I jumped on it, really," he said. Talk about Tom Sawyer's fence.

  There was, it appeared, a mysterious rite of initiation through which, in one way or another, almost every member of the team passed. The term that the old hands used for this rite — West invented the term, not the practice — was "signing up." By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success. You agreed to forsake, if necessary, family, hobbies, and friends — if you had any of these left (and you might not if you had signed up too many times before). From a manager's point of view, the practical virtues of the ritual were manifold. Labor was no longer coerced. Labor volunteered. When you signed up you in effect declared, "I want to do this job and I'll give it my heart and soul." It cut another way. The vice president of engineering, Carl Carman, who knew the term, said much later on: "Sometimes I worry that I pushed too hard. I tried not to push any harder than I would on myself. That's why, by the way, you have to go through the sign-up. To be sure you're not conning anybody."

  The rite was not accomplished with formal declarations, as a rule. Among the old hands, a statement such as "Yeah, I'll do that" could constitute the act of signing up, and often it was done tacitly — as when, without being ordered to do so, Alsing took on the role of chief recruiter.

  The old hands knew the game and what they were getting into. The new recruits, however, presented some problems in this regard.

  The demand for young computer engineers far exceeded the supply. The competition for them was fierce. What enticements could the Eclipse Group offer to the ones they wanted that companies such as IBM could not? Clearly, West and Alsing agreed, their strongest pitch would be the project itself. Alsing reasoned as follows: "Engineering school prepares you for big projects, and a lot of guys wind up as transformer designers. It's a terrible let down, I think. They end up with some rote engineering job with some thoroughly known technology that's repetitive, where all you have to do is look up the answers in books." By contrast, Alsing knew, it was thought to be a fine thing in the fraternity of hardware engineers — in the local idiom, it was "the sexy job" — to be a builder of new computers, and the demand for opportunities to be a maker of new computers also exceeded the supply. West put it this way: "We had the best high-energy story to tell a college graduate. They'd all heard about VAX. Well, we were gonna build a thirty-two-bit machine less expensive, faster and so on. You can sign a guy up to that any day of the year. And we got the best there was."

  But the new recruits were going to be asked to work at a feverish pace almost at once. They'd have no time to learn the true meaning of signing up on their own. They had to be carefully selected and they had to be warned. Common decency and the fear of having to feel lingering guilt demanded that this be done.

  The Eclipse Group solicited applications. One candidate listed "family life" as his main avocation. Alsing and another of West's lieutenants felt wary when they saw this. Not that they wanted to exclude family men, being such themselves. But Alsing wondered: "He seems to be saying he doesn't want to sign up." The other lieutenant pondered the application. "I don't think he'd be happy here," he said to himself. The applicant's grades were nothing special, and they turned him away.

  Grades mattered in this first winnowing of applications — not only as an indication of ability but also as a basis for guessing about a recruit's capacity for long, hard work — and with a few exceptions they turned down those whose grades were merely good.

  Alsing hoped to recruit some female engineers, but in 1978 they were still quite scarce. Only a few young women applied, and Alsing hired one, who had fine credentials.

  When they liked the looks of an application, they invited the young man — it was usually a young man — to Westborough, and the elders would interview him, one by one. If he was a potential Microkid, the recruit's interview with Alsing was often the crucial one. And a successful interview with Alsing constituted a signing up.

  Alsing would ask the young engineer, "What do you want to do?"

  Exactly what the candidate said — whether he was interested in one aspect of computers or another — didn't matter. Indeed, Alsing didn't care if a recruit showed no special fondness for computers; and the fact that an engineer had one of his own and liked to play with it did not argue for him.

  If the recruit seemed to say in reply, "Well, I'm just out of grad school and I'm looking at a lot of possibilities and I'm not sure what field I want to get into yet," then Alsing would usually find a polite way to abbreviate the interview. But if the recruit said, for instance, "I'm really interested in computer design," then Alsing would prod. The ideal interview would proceed in this fashion:

  "What interests you about that?"

  "I want to build one," says the recruit.

  ("That's what I want to hear," thinks Alsing. "Now I want to find out if he means it.")

  "What makes you think you can build a major computer?" asks Alsing.

  "Hey," says the recruit, "no offense, but I've used some of the machines you guys have built. I think I can do a better job."

  ("West and I have a story that we tell about Eagle machine. But I want to hear this guy tell me part of that story first. If he does, if there's some fire in his eyes — I say 'in his eyes,' because I don't know where it is; if it's there, it's there — but if he's a little cocky and I think we probably want this person, then I tell him our story.")

  "Well," says Alsing, "we're building this machine that's way out in front in technology. We're gonna design all new hardware and tools." ("I'm trying to give him a sense of, Hey, you've finally found in a, big company a place where people are really doing the ne
xt thing.'") "Do you like the sound of that?" asks Alsing.

  "Oh, yeah," says the recruit.

  ("Now I tell him the bad news.")

  "It's gonna be tough," says Alsing. "If we hired you, you'd be working with a bunch of cynics and egotists and it'd be hard to keep up with them."

  "That doesn't scare me," says the recruit.

  "There's a lot of fast people in this group," Alsing goes on. "It's gonna be a real hard job with a lot of long hours. And I mean long hours."

  "No," says the recruit, in words more or less like these. "That's what I want to do, get in on the ground floor of a new architecture. I want to do a big machine. I want to be where the action is."

  "Well," says Alsing, pulling a long face. "We can only let in the best of this year's graduates. We've already let in some awfully fast people. We'll have to let you know."

  ("We tell him that we only let in the best. Then we let him in.")

  "I don't know," said Alsing, after it was all done. "It was kind of like recruiting for a suicide mission. You're gonna die, but you're gonna die in glory."

  WALLACH'S GOLDEN MOMENT

  A young computer engineer, known to be one of the most skillful in Westborough's basement, said he had a fantasy about a better job than his. In it, he goes to work as a janitor for a computer company whose designs leave much to be desired. There, at night, disguised by mop and broom, he sneaks into the offices of the company's engineers and corrects the designs on their blackboards and desks.

  Dreams of pure freedom were not uncommon in the basement For those who had such fantasies, the best job imaginable would allow them to try to build the unattainable, the perfect computer. What, by contrast, would be one of the worst jobs? One that obliged an engineer to build a kludge. Tom West had to deal with such feelings. This was one of the first and most difficult of his problems.

  West needed an architect. In computers, an architecture describes what a machine will look like to the people who are going to write software for it. It tells not how the machine will be built, but what it will do, in detail. Drawing up such a blueprint would be the crucial first technical act in the making of this 32-bit, fully Eclipse-compatible computer that could have no mode bit. West wasn't absolutely certain that such a machine could be made. If it could, what would be the best approach? He had no idea, but he thought he knew who would. Right at the start West decided that a Data General employee named Steve Wallach should be Eagle's architect. "He's the only guy for that job," said West. "The guy's a walking dictionary and encyclopedia of computers. He's the best guy in the world for that job."

  Accordingly, West called Wallach to his office in the spring of 1978 and asked him to draw up the architecture for a 32 bit Eclipse.

  Steve Wallach glared at West. Wallach got to his feet and, coining a phrase, said: "Fuck that! I'm not puttin' a bag on the side of the Eclipse." Then he stomped out of West's office.

  For a time after that, Chuck Holland, an engineer who had been with the team a couple of years, worked on the architecture; he did a great deal of work a ad an entirely creditable job, as far as he was allowed to go. To West, however, no one else but Wallach would do. He'd get Wallach to sign up somehow. Wallach, he believed, really did want to work on a 32-bit Eclipse, he just didn't know it yet. West knew Wallach. He figured that as much as Wallach wanted to work with a clean sheet of paper and no constraints, he wanted two other things more. These were tangible success and revenge.

  Wallach was raised in Brooklyn. His father was a compositor, a practitioner of the craft of hot-metal typesetting, which will soon be all but demolished by the craft that Wallach chose to pursue. There is irony in that, but Wallach didn't think it lamentable. He remembered his father coming home from work with his clothes and hands covered with indelible printer's ink, and his father saying that he did not want his son growing up to come home dirty too. The younger Wallach's talents showed themselves early. He was a frequent and successful entrant in children's science fairs. He went to Stuyvesant High, one of New York City's best public schools; his grade point average — he remembered it exactly — was 93.67 and he graduated forty-eighth in his class. He won scholarships, first to Brooklyn Polytechnic, where he discovered computers and got his bachelor's degree, then to the University of Pennsylvania, where he took a master's in electrical engineering. Then he went to work at Honeywell, in Massachusetts.

  In one of his first jobs, Wallach worked as junior engineer on a piece of a fancy new computer. But just as that machine was nearly complete, Honeywell merged with General Electric, and when the dust settled the new computer had been scrapped. It never came to light. If Job had been a computer engineer, his travail would have begun in that way.

  "Engineers want to produce something," said Wallach. "I didn't go to school for six years just to get a paycheck. I thought that if this is what engineering's all about, the hell with it." He went to night school, to get a master's in business administration. "I was always looking for the buck. I'd get the M.B.A., go back to New York, and make some money," he figured. But he didn't really want to do that. He wanted to build computers.

  He took a job at Raytheon, and in time he was assigned to work on another fancy new machine, something called the advanced avionics digital computer, the Navy was paying for its development. According to Wallach, he and another young engineer did most of the actual work on it. One day a team of Navy consultants trooped through their lab. The consultants proclaimed the machine too complex; they said that the engineers would never get it to work. They were wrong. Wallach and his colleague brought the computer to life. "Near the end we probably worked a hundred hours a week," he remembered. "We fought over every little detail, no holds barred, and then we'd go out and play bridge." But then the Navy decided not to build any more of the machines. "To be quite honest, from day one we suspected that the Navy probably wouldn't buy it. It was more that the high-class consultants came in and said we wouldn't get it to work. We said, 'Fuck that, don't tell us what we can do.'" All in all, Wallach felt pleased about that piece of work. It was a technical success, he said, and it bolstered his reputation. Once again, however, his machine did not, as West would say, get out the door. Wallach went to Data General a few years later. The bait that lured him, was the promise that he'd get to work right from the start — "on the ground floor" — on the new, supra-state-of-the- art machine that became FHP. Great excitement attended the beginnings of this project. The lucky engineers assigned to it would work on it outside of the plant — in an apartment, for the sake of security, this was such an important project. There was a meeting. An executive tossed a set of keys onto the table. They were the keys to the apartment, and the room number matched the alias of secret agent James Bond: 007. Wallach liked that touch, but he was most impressed by the fact that the company would place no important constraints upon the designers of the new computer. They could pursue pure technical excellence. They were being given a clean sheet of paper. To himself, Wallach said, "Wow!"

  He worked on the grand machine for two years. He read and he studied, putting the finishing touches on what was already an encyclopedic knowledge of the best that had been thought and done in computers. Nothing but the best would be good enough for FHP. He lived for that machine. But then the unfinished plans and many of the designers went to North Carolina. Wallach felt he couldn't go. Thus he lost another machine, the best of them all so far.

  Wallach was one of several engineers who, working day and night, designed the comely EGO after FHP went south. Then EGO was canceled, for the first time. Wallach got a few things from his office and stomped out of Westborough. He went home for two weeks. Around the time that he returned, DEC announced the VAX. Studying the VAX's architecture, Wallach felt sad. Some of VAX's features were remarkably like EGO's, but EGO was better, Wallach believed. He felt very angry. "We had DEC where we wanted them with EGO."

  It was Wallach who suggested to West the idea for Victor. Wallach worked on that machine for a time. Victor died grad
ually. EGO was revived, and for a little while Wallach really thought that they'd get to build it after all. But de Castro turned it down again.

  Wallach had now spent more than a decade working on computing equipment. He'd had a hand in the design of five computers— all good designs, in his opinion. He had worked long hours on all of them. He had put himself into those creatures of metal and silicon. And he had seen only one of them come to functional life, and in that case the customer had decided not to buy the machine.

  When EGO-2 got shot down, Wallach went home again, in a rage. Once more, he stayed away for two weeks, but when he came back, he was still angry. He got angrier when West suggested that he create the architecture for a 32-bit Eclipse, because the constraints upon Eagle seemed imprisoning. Eagle would be backward and messy. What a comedown working on it would be!

  Clearly, however, Wallach was a man who was ready to get a machine out the door.

  The soles of Wallach's cowboy boots faced his office door. He was stretched out in his chair, his feet up on his desk. He was slender, not skinny, with wavy brown hair that was slicked back but still a little unruly. His complexion was pale, for making computers is an indoor occupation and not much vitamin D got into the basement. He was in his midthirties.

  Wallach had his own, real, if windowless office, down the hall from West's. It was just like West's in its skeleton but differently adorned. Here, enthusiasm lay under less than strict control. Papers lay all over the flat surfaces. Ferns in pots hung from the ceiling. Stuck with pins to the walls were cartoons, T-shirts, posters, postcards and, over by the doorway, a brown paper bag — a joke, the figurative bag on the side of Eclipse given material shape.