The Soul of a New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

  I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.

  PINBALL

  Sometimes they slowed down, usually to wait for some new part. At the onset of such pauses, Ken Holberger felt as though he had poked his head up through a trapdoor. He noticed once again that other groups in the basement had more space for offices than they. Take a look at this lab, they said to each other. It was little. It was noisy. Remember those nights back in February when some of the guys wore coats while working on Coke and Gollum? Well, nowadays, you didn't have to go outside the lab to know that summer had arrived.

  One of the Hardy Boys brought to the lab a thermometer. When the temperature reached eighty-eight degrees, Holberger propped open the door to the outer hall. "So we can get the hot breeze from the hallway." On an evening visit, Carl Carman frowned to see the door opened — it was a breach of security — and he kicked it shut. Their vice president had closed it and they did not dare reopen it. But then the thermometer went right off scale. It was too much. The Hardy Boys walked out, and finally West burst from his office. "West went into forest-fire mode," said Holberger. At long last, West got Maintenance to repair the lab's cooling system. The Hardy Boys ended their wildcat strike. The Microteam had their own computer, but they noticed that when someone was using the simulator, Trixie ran ever so slowly. We could use another computer, they said. But don't bother to ask, they told each other; after all, we had to battle West just to get Trixie.

  But the Microteam was lucky compared to the Hardy Boys. "This group has built four models of Eclipses," said Holberger, "and we haven't even got one for our own use in the lab. We have to share Woodstock with every other group except for Bernstein's, which has two computers of its own." It got so bad during crises that Holberger had to send out emergency warning messages. This was how it worked:

  Holberger runs into a problem —he needs to reprogram a PAL. To do that he needs the services of a functioning computer. He hurries to his cubicle and turns on his terminal, which is hooked up to the Eclipse called Woodstock. But a message appears on his screen saying that the program will not run, he'll have to wait — too many other engineers are using Woodstock now. But Holberger can't wait. So through his terminal he broadcasts an EMERGENCY WARNING MESSAGE. Throughout the basement, on every screen of every terminal using Woodstock at the moment, this message now appears. It says, in effect, "Shut down your terminal at once because the system is crashing." From his terminal Holberger can watch the various responses to this false alarm. Some engineers just go on working, he notes with amusement. "The cynical and jaded," he thinks. But enough other users shut down their terminals for Holberger to run the PAL program.

  Holberger grinned. "I have the feeling that's the kind of behavior West approves of."

  That summer, in Mini News, one of two in-house company papers, an article appeared bragging that Data General was spending a larger percentage of its profits on research and development than almost any other company in the industry — more, indeed, than the vast majority of American companies of every sort. Holberger saw the article. He took it into West's office. "Hey, Tom, where's it all going?" Was the lion's share going to North Carolina? Some suspected it was — but only in moments like these, the competition had receded so much.

  One of the team decided he'd like to have his own business card. Others liked the idea. They felt they deserved them. After all, some other groups in Westborough dispensed personal cards to their members. So some of the Eclipse Group took the request to Carl Alsing, who agreed to ask West. They waited outside. "Sorry," said Alsing, when he came out of West's office. "Tom says no."

  "How come?"

  "He just says, 'No.'"

  Another story made the rounds: that in turning down a suggestion that the group buy a new logic analyzer, West once said, "An analyzer costs ten thousand dollars. Overtime for engineers is free."

  Dave Peck was at one point sent to Data General's semiconductor facility in California to perform what he considered to be "a near impossible job." He didn't get it done. Upon returning to Westborough, he wanted to go back to take another crack at it. He took his request to Alsing. He and Alsing went to West.

  "I'm not gonna send Peck out there for another vacation on company time," said West to Alsing, in front of Peck.

  Peck had an odd, some said a corny, sense of humor, and a few in the group resented it sometimes. "He's having a good time, while we're all burning up," said one of them. But others thoroughly enjoyed him. Peck had heard West use disdainfully the phrase "software mentality." Peck, who had come from Software, believed this mentality existed and that he himself possessed it. "If you'd walk into Software, there was paper all over the walls," he said. Around the time when Data General stood accused of burning down a competitor's factory, Peck remembered, a picture of de Castro appeared on a wall in Software: the bottom edge of the photograph was charred and a sign below asked,

  Would You Buy A Used Car From This Man? Peck's own office was full of posters. Data General Free Food and Beer, said one; he had picked it up at a company picnic. "I like a noisy room," he said.

  Peck was slightly plump, with a thin mustache that he often stroked. Years before, when he was working in another department, he had to deal with a peer whom he considered to be incompetent and a meddler. Feeling sorely provoked, Peck one day said to this engineer, "You're an asshole." Ordered by his boss to apologize, Peck went to the man he had insulted, looking sheepish, and said, "I'm sorry you're an asshole." He never talked back to West, however. "I don't know, I guess I never thought of him as an asshole. Just mean."

  But Peck got hold of a poster advertising the movie Lord of the Rings. The poster depicted most of the characters in cartooned form, and Peck labeled them. He made the Hobbits Microkids — "They're kinda cute, you know" — and he put his own name beside one of the heroic-looking figures; the skinny, treacherous character, Gollum, he christened "Tom West." Peck hung the poster right next to Woodstock. But afraid that West might see it, and not knowing what would happen if he did, some of the younger members of the team moved the poster to an obscure corner, out of sight.

  Many of the team, especially some of the Hardy Boys, said they felt comfortable around their division's vice president, Carl Carman. He visited the lab almost every morning and evening now. He asked them about their problems. He knew all their names. But most of them, when they ran into West in the hallways, got the feeling that their immediate boss did not know nearly so much about them. "He'll look off in another direction as he walks by, and you never see him smile." When West did speak to the masses, some felt afraid.

  It seemed peculiar to some of the team. Here they were laboring mightily on the most crucial project in the company, and yet they lacked equipment, comforts and all signs of recognition from their boss. Their project had number-one priority. Their vice president said so. Who among them could doubt that what they were doing was important to the company? The problem had to lie with West. "Why are some managers effective in getting resources and Tom isn't? That's my bitch," complained one member of the team.

  "Sometimes even the pencil supply seems short," said another. "I can't help but think that someone wants us to run lean and mean because he thinks we work better that way. I don't know. Maybe Carman doesn't have the pull. Maybe Tom West only talks tough to people at his own level and below. Maybe he wants us to look lean and mean to impress other people above him."

  When they had time on their hands to look up from the machine, some saw that they were building Eagle all by themselves, without any significant help from their leader. It was their project, theirs alone. West was just an office out of which came "disconnected inputs and outputs," said one Hardy Boy. He shrugged. It didn't matter. "West may be acting as a real good buffer between us and the rest of the company. Or maybe he's not doing anything."

  Alsing listened, and sometimes he smiled. "When this is all over, there are gonna be thirty inventors of the Eagle machine," h
e predicted. "Tom's letting them believe that they invented it. It's cheaper than money."

  West had put this project together, almost single-handedly. If West did nothing else, Alsing felt, Eagle would still in some ways be West's machine. But the idea that he was doing nothing else was crazy, although Alsing could understand why many on the team got that impression. Maybe they were supposed to. West had never sat down with him and Rasala and Steve Wallach and Rosemarie Seale and said: "We're gonna bury this team. They're not gonna see anything except the machine." But West had said, in a cautionary tone: "There's thirty guys out there who think it's their machine. I don't want that tampered with. It's very useful to me right now." Another time, he had remarked, wearing his crooked little grin: "Some of the kids don't have a notion that there's a company behind all of this. It could be the CIA funding this. It could be a psychological test."

  The managers had sealed off the team right from the start, telling every recruit not to do so much as mention the name Eagle to anyone outside the group. Although once in a while the pencil supply did grow short, the worst administrative problems never touched the Microkids and Hardy Boys. "We were buried, to the point where we were almost underground," said one of the Microkids long afterward, adding, with the air of one from whose eyes scales have just fallen, that Rosemarie served them so well they never realized the full extent of what she did for them.

  By the spring, Software had begun to flood the project with programmers. Hiring its own large team of new recruits, the software team was now preparing the huge, complex body of system software that had to exist in order for Eagle to become more than an interesting exercise in computer engineering. Technical relations between Software and the Eclipse Group were complex, like those between Hardy Boys and Microkids, but no one except Wallach had to deal extensively with software. West had made Wallach the lone emissary to Software, saying whenever Wallach complained, "If you don't have system software, you don't have a machine." Wallach carried messages back and forth, and sometimes invented messages of his own, he said, in order to slip some nice new feature past West. Absorbing criticism from both sides, Wallach played courier, arbitrator and referee, and enjoyed it, he said.

  As the summer came on, increasing numbers of intruders were being let into the lab — diagnostic programmers and, particularly, those programmers from Software. Some Hardy Boys had grown fond of the prototypes of Eagle, as you might of a pet or a plant you've raised from a seedling. Now Rasala was telling them that they couldn't work on their machines at certain hours, because Software needed to use them. There was an explanation: the project was at a precarious stage; if Software didn't get to know and like the hardware and did not speak enthusiastically about it, the project might be ruined; the Hardy Boys were lucky that Software wanted to use the prototypes — and they had to keep Software happy. Possibly, no explanation would have sufficed for some Hardy Boys, they were so fond of their prototypes. At any rate, no full one was offered. They were left to add this insult, if they chose, to the list of West's offenses.

  From time to time, Rasala and Alsing would tell some of their troops that West was acting as a buffer between them and the company bureaucrats, but the two managers didn't go into details. To do so would have violated West's unspoken orders — "an unspoken agreement," said Alsing, "that we won't pass on the garbage and the politics." They wished sometimes that the rest of the team could get a glimpse of West when some other manager dared to criticize the Eclipse Group or one of its members. West, notoriously, kept a double standard in such matters. He criticized other groups but would brook no criticism directed toward his own. He could carry this policy to absurd lengths, Rasala thought Sometimes West would simply ignore criticism directed toward his team. Sometimes he would answer it with questions in this vein: "Are your people working sixty hour weeks?"

  Alsing and Rasala went often to West's office, closed the door, and asked him why they could not give the team more space and equipment. West probably felt that a little material hardship was good for young engineers, Alsing reasoned — that an embattled feeling provoked energy, that frills would just get in the way. "Tom's also cheap," he said. That was the old-time Data General way; one myth had it that the company used to zealously conserve paperclips. As for West's unfriendliness to his troops, Alsing had heard him say more than once, "No one ever pats anyone on the back around here. That's how it works." Alsing came away convinced, however, that West had an important strategy. "We're small potatoes now, but when Eagle is real, he'll have clout and can make nonnegotiable demands for salary, space, equipment and especially future products." Rasala came away with the same idea: "Maybe it's ego. But West has some interesting notions, ahhhhhhhd, I kinda believe him. His whole notion is that he doesn't want to fight for petty wins when there's a bigger game in town."

  They didn't have to name the bigger game. Everyone who had been on the team for a while knew what it was called. It didn't involve stock options. Rasala and Alsing and many of the team had long since decided that they would never see more than token rewards of a material sort. The bigger game was "pinball." West had coined the term; all the old hands used it. "You win one game, you get to play another. You win with this machine, you get to build the next." Pinball was what counted. It was the tacit promise that lay behind signing up, at least for some. Holberger felt that way. "I said, 'I will do this, I want do it. I recognize from the beginning it's gonna be a tough job. I'll have to work hard, and if we do a good job, we get to do it again.'"

  West, said Alsing, was "saving his coins," to fight if necessary for the team's right to play again.

  Meanwhile, out in her open workplace, located at the junction of two corridors, Rosemarie heard the young engineers complaining about their cold, mysterious leader. She began to grieve for West that summer. In her mind she said, "They don't know him at all!" She had felt he was making a mistake in being so aloof, but now she wondered. "Hey, they're all very intelligent, very creative, and every one of them is ready to take the world and give it a spin. There has to be a strong person in Tom's position. He'd be laughed out of the department if he wasn't, and no one ever laughs at Tom."

  Rosemarie kept such thoughts to herself, until long after they first began. Then they just rolled out: "Maybe the guys thought that project was a gift from upstairs, but there's no doubt in my mind — it's not even worth talking about—-it wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been there, and sure, there wouldn't have been the problems, but nobody would have had the chance, including myself, to do what we wanted to do.

  "I know people who felt afraid of him. But he had a twinkle in his eye! You can't be scared of someone with a twinkle in his eye who allows you to do things. I can't imagine someone else running that show. Someone else might have smiled at them and said the right words, but not many bosses would have done as much as he did for them, letting them grow in their work, giving them a chance to really do something. Tom West gave the appearance of not caring for them, but he did the things that a person would do if he did care for them. Life is odd. Is it the words? Or the thing itself? I don't think those guys could've accepted a person keeping their minds down, but I don't think they know it yet. For a lot of them, you see, this was their first working experience. They never had a boss who kept them down. I have.

  "He kept it inside him. He didn't go out and complain. Maybe he didn't pat people on the back, but he didn't complain either. He was very tired. He poured himself into it. I think he allowed all the complaints to be on himself. I think it was deliberate. My opinion is he wanted them to have someone to lay it all on, all their problems, so they could get rid of their frustrations and all their problems quicker and go on and do that thing that was desperately needed. I think he set himself out there as the bad guy, but bad guy is too strong. For people to grow up they need someone to lay their problems on. 'You're the daddy.'" She laughed. "Whether he did that or not deliberately, it had that effect."

  Dave Keating, to whom West never said so much as hel
lo during the project, felt with the others that West was to blame for many of their small frustrations. But months later, when he'd had a chance to take more than a cursory look around, he remarked: "We had a lot of problems getting resources, but we've still got those problems now. Maybe it wasn't West so much." Keating also wondered in retrospect whether, under the circumstances, some bad feelings weren't inevitable; and it seemed to him fortunate that the team's members had not as a rule turned on each other or on their immediate managers. "The way West was with us, it provided a one-level separation — someone far enough away to lay blame on."

  On a Friday afternoon in spring, about four o'clock, seeing that there was nothing more that they could do until they got a certain new printed-circuit board, Rasala said to his Hardy Boys, "Let's get outta here." A bunch of them made off down the hallway toward the back door of the basement. There were windows that way, and sunlight in them. They hurried toward the light, trailing real laughter behind.

  West sat in his office, the door open. As the laughter died away, he rubbed his nose under the bridge of his glasses and, looking up, made his small cockeyed grin. "Well, I guess I gotta find someone to design the fucking plug."

  "A plug," said Rasala, when asked about that crucial piece of electrical hardware. "You gotta have one." He rubbed his chin. "But I wouldn't know how to design a plug." It was the age of specialists. West had to look elsewhere in the basement for a maker of plugs.

  Would Eagle fit into a freight elevator in Europe and the Orient as well as in the U.S.A.? West thought he'd better make sure that it could. When Rasala had gone to London with a model of the M/600, to set up that machine for its European debut, he had discovered that the computer would not fit into the elevator of the building where the announcement would take place. He'd had to take the brand-new computer completely apart, in a parking lot in London, one midwinter afternoon.