The Soul of a New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

  Ever since he had gone to work for Data General, West had been talking about quitting. Someday he'd wander off. In a sense, he already did so every day. West would drive away from West- borough — a place of sharp edges, functional, new — and twenty minutes later, he would arrive at his farmhouse. It sat on a country lane. A wooden plaque near the front door announced that it was erected in 1780. For some years after that, the residents must have kept busy adding things on. It was a place of many nooks and crannies. An ell went off at a right angle to the main structure; to the ell was attached a barn; and to the first barn was attached another. Behind the barns was a tall wooden silo.

  West had previously owned a new and smaller house in the vicinity. When there was nothing left for him to do in the way of renovations, he had sold it and had bought the farm, with its leaking roofs and sagging, rotting barns. In several years he had almost completely restored it. He had had some tenants once, who on Sunday afternoons would set up lawn chairs outside and watch him work on the structures. West resented that invasion of his privacy, but you could understand their interest. He was the sort of carpenter who transformed things. "Tom likes to do things 'right' — and I mean quotes around 'right,'" said his wife. The evidence lay all around. He'd rebuilt roofs and walls and jacked up sagging girders, and what he had finished had all the right touches. He'd taken a room in which no corner was square, no wall plumb, and had transformed it into an airy kitchen. The cabinets looked perfect; how patiently and carefully he must have worked to fit them to that room's slanting walls and quirky corners. In the living room was a lovely mahogany coaching table with invisible hinges; West had built it from scratch. His crowning domestic achievement, though, was his basement workshop.

  Most of the basement's walls were made of fieldstones, laid up dry originally, but covered now with cement in such a way that you could see the outlines of the boulders. This masonry had not been done without some communal effort apparently, for on one wall, in black paint, this question was inscribed:

  What's A Place Like This Doing To A Nice Girl Like You?

  There were several chambers. In one sat most of the machines: a lathe, a shaper, a radial-arm saw, a band saw, a drill press, a sanding machine, two grinding wheels (with goggles nearby), and an old belt-driven table saw in immaculate condition. There was a spacious woodworking bench with a handsome wooden vise, and, hanging above it, wood clamps, chisels, backsaws, crosscut saws, coping saws, keyhole saws—you'd touch the edges of their blades with care.

  "A window on West's soul," theorized an old friend of his, speaking of this basement. Need a pencil sharpener? There was one in every chamber, right where you wanted it to be. Some music? A couple of loudspeakers sat on shelves in corners of the machinery room. A phone? There it was. A chair? One for every mood. Beer? The old refrigerator in the corner of the front chamber was fully stocked. A hammer? Practically every kind ever invented right in its place. A coat? Under the stairs on wooden pegs hung a blue denim jacket, an old slicker, a logger's jacket, a sailor's blue pea-coat — all somewhat worn and faded but giving off a scent like laundry on the line.

  On posts and basement windowsills were tacked-up aphorisms, mementos and photographs. One card read: "The appreciation of pleasing decay is an important one because it is so often neglected." It's Easy To Do It Yourself, said another placard. A hand-lettered wooden sign read: Ground Bone For Sale. A button reminded you that there had been a "Great Boston Kite Festival." A small photograph showed a robed figure astride a camel in a desert. "What's this?" a visitor asks, and West pounces: "The first known picture of Jesus Christ," he says.

  Among miscellaneous items reposing here and there were an old brass cleat, fishing rods, a compressor, and a rusty something or other from the olden days of farming. And there was a room for metalworking, suitably equipped.

  The storeroom lay off the machine shop. Along three of its walls, from the floor to the high ceiling, were shelves of glass jars, recycled coffee cans, cardboard boxes — all labeled in a firm clear hand, as follows: "Special Car Tools," "Gravely," "Flat Head Lifters," "Electrical Things," "Telephone Stuff," "Antenna Stuff," "Shoe Polish," "Brushes," "Good Brushes," "Rockets," and "More Rockets." I turned and there were two tall bookcases, also stocked with jars and coffee cans, containing, with all the sizes labeled, "screws," "washers," "bolts," "tacks," "rivets," "plugs," "bearings," "nails," "springs," and "shaker pegs." This was an adventurous boy's pockets. This was a craftsman's workshop. It would be a fine place to spend a Saturday morning. Everything was dusted, swept, sorted, labeled, hung near at hand and put away in the proper drawer. Could this be the workshop of the man who wrote on his Magic Marker board at work, "Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well"?

  West often talked about building the "right" machine. He meant "right" in the commercial sense, emphatically.

  But one day, back near the beginning of Eagle, Rosemarie Seale had gone into West's office and asked him, "Is it going to be a good machine?"

  West said: "Yes, Rosemarie. It's going to be good."

  As West's father had risen toward the top of AT&T, the family had moved many times. There was one year, when West was in high school and the family was residing in Lincoln, Nebraska, that West could not remember at all. He did recall that he was always working on things. He once bought a run-down little sailboat, stripped it to the bare wood, and rebuilt it, until it did gleam. As a finishing touch, he carved a set of cherry-wood belaying pins. Then he built a trailer and, behind a succession of cars whose engines he had also rebuilt, he towed his sailboat around the country — to Illinois, to Oklahoma City, to Martha's Vineyard.

  He went to Amherst College, in western Massachusetts, where he studied the natural sciences. He did so without academic distinction, and it happened that Amherst was just then embracing a new Calvinist fad called the underachiever program: young men' whose brains seemed much better than their grades were expelled for a year, so that they might improve their characters. At Amherst, certainly, and possibly in the entire nation, West became the first officially branded underachiever. It was something he'd always remember.

  One of West's fondest memories was of playing in the town band with his father, in the little burg where they resided in Illinois. West played the trombone then, and had taken up the guitar since. Now, expelled from Amherst, he spent his year of exile in Cambridge, Massachusetts, unrepentantly playing the guitar. It was the very early sixties. West played at coffeehouses. He fell in among folksingers. He knew some of the famous ones before they became so. When he returned to Amherst the following year, he spoke of little else.

  Trying to name the social change he thought he'd seen beginning, West would say, "People were leaving Harvard and becoming masons." As for himself, he decided to become an engineer. Some of his friends were astonished. The very word, engineer, dulled the spirit. It was something your father might be interested in.

  "I think I wanted to see how complicated things happen," West said years later. 'There's some notion of control, it seems to me, that you can derive in a world full of confusion if you at least understand how things get put together. Even if you can't under stand every little part, how infernal machines get put together."

  A classmate at Amherst remembered West as "smart — off the charts — but also naive. No, not exactly naive, but like a boy — uh, romantic. He believed in pie in the sky."

  Indeed, West did not intend to do any old sort of engineering. He thought he would find a place in the space program and help to build the electronic equipment, monumental in its complexity, that would send men to the moon. On his own, near the end of college, he taught himself some digital electronics. But a few inquiries led him to feel that the interesting work in the space program was already spoken for. He managed to get a job with the Smithsonian Institution instead.

  For the Smithsonian, West built and carried all over the world, to various satellite tracking stations, a series of digital clocks that told exactly the right time. At a bor
der town in Colombia, the authorities mistook his clock for a newfangled weapon and threw him in jail. He went to sea. He saw Africa and Asia. Those were West's days as a far-wandering engineer, and when he reminisced about them, he certainly made them sound romantic. After seven years, however, he quit. He was married now and a father.

  Old friends and acquaintances whom West had known back in Cambridge had become famous or semifamous musicians. He expressed no illusions about aping their success, but it made him want to take up the guitar seriously again. He'd support his family with some easy, mindless job. He figured he had to find a job that would keep him out of the military draft, for this was during the late sixties, when politicians still talked of nailing the coonskin cap to the walls of Cam Ranh Bay. A couple of the older engineers in West's team would tell the same story; they avoided the Vietnam War by joining companies that were making things for it.

  Because jobs in the field appeared to be numerous and because not far from his home in central Massachusetts several companies had set themselves up in the business, West decided to become a computer engineer. At the Smithsonian he had learned to design digital circuitry — logic design, as it is called — but he in no way qualified as an engineer of computers. He had gone to school at a time when students of physics still carried slide rules and only the rare college had a computer that students could use. So he went to the local library and took out all of its modest collection of books about computers and studied them on the deck at the back of his house for about six weeks; then, when he felt he had mastered enough of the jargon to talk a good game, and in a hurry, lest he forget everything that he'd read, he talked his way into a job at RCA.

  It did not work out as he planned. "I thought I'd get a really dumb job. I found out dumb jobs don't work. You come home too tired to do anything," he said. He remembered a seemingly endless succession of meetings out of which only the dullest, most cautious decisions could emerge. He remembered watching himself play with his thumbs beneath the edges of conference tables for hours and hours. Near the end of his time at RCA he got to work on projects that interested him. He saw a few patents registered in his name. He became what he'd pretended to be, a real computer engineer; but by then, RCA had lost a fortune trying to compete with IBM and was getting out of computers. The time to change jobs was upon West again.

  Data General lay nearby. He went in for an interview. An executive sneered at his credentials, asked him what made him think he could build computers, and then hired him. Someone in Personnel told him to go see a certain engineering-team leader and find out what his problem was, and in no time at all West found himself working on a state-of-the-art computer, the first Eclipse.

  West remembered working on the prototype of the Eclipse. Most evenings the company's president, Ed de Castro himself, would appear in the lab, eating a Fudgsicle. The soft-spoken de Castro wouldn't say much. He'd ask a few questions, ones that seemed remarkably acute to West. The questions and the man's mere presence made West feel, again and again, "This project is really important."

  Then one night, without any warning, de Castro said to him softly, "Got that fucking pig working yet?"

  West was startled, then amused, and finally, though he could hardly explain it to himself, aroused. No. But I will, he wanted to say to de Castro.

  For some time during the debugging of the first Eclipse, West was ill every morning before work —a psychological form of morning sickness, perhaps. But when the job was done and he went to the factory floor and saw a long file of brand-new Eclipses come gliding down a conveyor belt, some great delight, which he would describe as "almost a chemical change," came over him, and what he wanted most of all to do then was to do it all over again someday, only better.

  To the observant Rosemarie, it seemed that West was always planning. She began to believe that he planned almost everything that happened during the season of Eagle. As time went on he seemed to grow skinnier and skinnier before her eyes, as if the job and all that planning were somehow consuming his flesh. Once in a while she would look into his office. He would be staring at some paper and wouldn't notice her standing in the doorway. She would watch for a moment. "Why is he doing this?" she wondered. "He belongs in the north woods somewhere, canoeing and fishing and appreciating nature. He doesn't belong here."

  Long afterward, at a time when she found herself talking about West in the past tense — "Geez, I hate to talk about him in the past" — the question of West's motivation still had importance for her. Most people, she reasoned, do jobs because they are told to and might get fired if they don't obey. But certainly West didn't have to drum up Eagle and waste away over it. Indeed, from her perspective, it really did seem as though the company didn't want the project undertaken at all. "So why is he doing it?" she asked.

  "There's a big high in here somewhere for me that I don't fully understand," said West. "Some of it's a raw power-trip

  "The reason why I work is because I win

  "Realistically, I've got some stock in this company. I gotta help keep it afloat for a while."

  Someone once suggested to West that he wanted to build Eagle out of love for chains and whips. West lay awake several nights worrying that it might be so.

  "I'm sitting here burning myself up and doing it because I like it. You wouldn't have to pay me very much to do this," he said one night while he sat fretting, sick to his stomach over the slow progress of the debugging.

  Later "I'm trying to talk myself into quitting

  "Not many people around here would admit to being in business," he said. And: "What makes this all possible is doing this and putting money on the bottom line and not having to go all the way with the capitalist system "

  "What makes it all possible is the kids."

  When he talked about his reasons for wanting to build Eagle, West might have been trying to figure out how to get one of his lieutenants to sign up. He said he wished someone could explain his reasons to him. He said once, "De Castro knows what makes. me go." He smiled. "The bastard."

  He also said: "No one ever pats anybody on the back around here. If de Castro ever patted me on the back, I'd probably quit."

  I traveled with West to New York. We stopped at a grocery store in which the cash registers were equipped with one of those devices that reads the price of an item automatically, a computerized checkout system. This one wasn't working well. West got down on his hands and knees and poked his head in under the cashier's counter to have a look at the thing.

  The clerk made her mouth an O.

  When West came out, dusting off his hands, he explained that he had helped design this particular model when he had worked at RCA. 'It's a kludge," he said grinning.

  The clerk had some trouble figuring what the beer we bought ought to cost, and as we left, West said, out of her earshot, "Ummmmh, one of the problems with machines like that. You end up making people so dumb they can't figure out how many six-packs are in a case of beer."

  West didn't like digital watches particularly. Anyone who dared to consult such a chronometer and in his hearing say, "The exact time is...," could expect to receive the full force of his scorn, for being such a fool as to think that a watch was accurate just because it had no hands.

  He harbored suspicions about people who kept their own computers to play with after working on computers all day. In his office, so tidy it looked stark, West's only filing cabinet seemed to be his wastebasket, and although he did hook up a computer terminal in his office on a couple of occasions during the seasons of Eagle, he never kept it there for long. He couldn't wait to get the computer out of his sight — or so it seemed to Rasala. Rasala was amused, but he also wondered how in the world West got along without daily access to a computer.

  West didn't seem to like many of the fruits of the age of the transistor. Of machines he had helped to build, he said, "If you start getting interested in the last one, then you're dead." But there was more to it. "The old things, I can't bear to look at them. They're clum
sy. I can't believe we were that dumb." He spoke about the rapidity with which computers became obsolete. "You spend all this time designing one machine and it's only a hot box for two years, and it has all the useful life of a washing machine." He said, "I've seen too many machines." One winter night, at his home, while he was stirring up the logs in his fireplace, he muttered, "Computers are irrelevant."

  Building them and, especially, getting them out the door still interested West, though. In the basement was an engineer named Dave Bernstein, by general consensus a brilliant circuit designer. Though just twenty-seven, Bernstein was running the group that designed microcomputers. A veteran of FHP and EGO, labors that he never got to complete, he felt eager to finish something. So that winter Bernstein built a new microprocessor entirely by himself. He got the last bugs out of it early one Sunday morning and on-the instant let out a whoop, a cry of pure joy — his triumphant howl, appropriately enough, echoing down empty hallways.