Perhaps it is to computing what the Fountainhead is to architecture. The feeling from the inside of a great moment or historical period that encapsulates an idea(l) can't be told factually. The space race. The Manhattan project. Cracking Enigma at Bletchley Park. We all read those boks and watch the movies, and wish we had been inside those moments. Reality was probably heat, dust, coffee, burned fingers with soldering irons, paperwork, money arguments, getting cranky working late hours... much the same as your ordinary workday.

Yep, even for military projects such as SAGE and Bombe, I'd say the a normal day is not too different from an engineer's normal day. After all we are all humans, and bureaucracy inevitably grows within all such large projects.

I'm not sure. I've been through some interesting ones. Some pioneering work on courseware for Apple II computers, one of the first Brazilian news portals, the third-gen Brazilian voting machines (the one with Windows CE - not my fault)... All these had the feeling that we were on to something big, not that we were writing history, but that history was writing itself, as if all we could do was to surf that huge wave. And surf them we did.

I understand the value of work-life balance, and I wouldn't compromise it on a normal day-to-day operation, but when you feel like you are doing something really great, it's almost like the art takes control and you need to chanel it into the world. That the thing you are building is begging to exist and you are the one who can deliver it.

It's a great feeling.

Rereading it as an adult (1st time at end of high school), I agree. In my wanderings I've found the link below which is a less polished, perhaps more true version of DG which makes me think it wouldn't have been so fun.

http://www.teamfoster.com/billteamfostercom

One of the secrecy things in that piece really resonated.

I was at an executive briefing with some major customer at the briefing center. We were a couple of days away from from some new product launch that was relevant to the briefing but were under orders not to say anything. Anyway, my--I think--manager's manager decided to sketch a few TBA things out on the whiteboard or blackboard anyway when Edson walked in to say hello. She very unobstrusively managed to erase what was on the board before Edson noticed.

It's an excellent, nearly perfect instruction manual on how to run a tech business -- in the situation and time that tech business was in.

For context, DG was about to go obsolete, but Tom (and others) recognized this where almost nobody else would've, and managed to transform the company from a mainframe company to a minicomputer company, with a small, ragtag team of dedicated engineers, without a map or prior art, and with desultory support from the checked-out, incompetent C-suite.

Tom's idiosyncratic, no-nonsense style wasn't for everyone, but I can think of very few tech leaders who could have succeeded as a manager in that situation.

Source: worked directly for Tom at Data General for several years.

Thanks for sharing. I'm really fascinated by everything in DG. Actually I didn't know DG until now.

Is it possible for you to share a bit more? I'm sorry for being vague but I assume anything would be of interest of the HN public right now. If there is really a need for a topic, I couldn't help but Googled your name, looks like you are involved in a project called "Poppet", maybe it is possible to speak a bit about that one?

Thanks!

I also dotted-lined into Tom in the 90s when the big DG NUMA Unix servers were being developed. I was the product manager for the line--along with a bunch of other systems going back to the mid-80s a few years after the "Eagle" in the book was released.

I've shared this before but a really interesting internal publication from the mid-80s was A Year in Development with lots of interviews and photographs. https://archive.org/details/year-in-dev/mode/2up

Here's a piece I wrote about 13 years ago:

https://metatalk.metafilter.com/13606/Jessamyn-in-Valley-New...

Hi felix!

Hacker News is a treasure just for this kind of encounter.

Thanks! Gonna pour over that and other docs.

This memoir about working at DG in the 70s was linked on HN yesterday:

Data General History: The Fair Bastards http://www.teamfoster.com/billteamfostercom

via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33793837 - no comments

Thanks! I'm reading the Foster one whole night and this morning, Googling along the way. Those were great times, eh?

Here is an advertising brochure for DG's first product, the Nova minicomputer, when it appeared in 1968. A weird mix of technical information and full-page close up photos of DG executives trying to look tough:

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Data_Gener...

Interesting. I got the exact feeling -- From some pages I read hardcore assembler instructions, but from others I saw someone that looks like a mafia boss.

Must be interesting time though. I love those "Byte" and "Dr.Dobb" magazine ads in general. They are all very creative and sometimes do not shy away from "exotic" stuffs such as beautiful ladies and such. I wonder what sub-industry still has that kind of culture :)

For another view of DG & Tom: I interviewed Dick Sonderegger [1] who also worked there and knew most of the people. He said they generally had a low opinion of Kidder and thought he'd believe anything you told him.

That said, it IS still a great book, and given that Kidder's not an engineer, he did an amazing job.

[1] https://operationcode.org/podcast#dick-sonderegger-link

The "he didn't know anything, we coulda told him anything and he woulda bought it" line, which Sonderegger relayed from the DG guys, speaks more poorly of the DG guys than anyone else. I mean, if what a dummy he was for believing us is their critique of the work... that's gross, right?

Maybe I'm missing some crucial context or something.

Nice interview with Sonderegger.

All I know is what he said.

"what a dummy he was for believing us" -- I don't know if that's really what they thought. Maybe it was more like "he didn't try to verify anything, ask any hard questions, or get any context on it." It's been too long since I've read the book.

Did you like the bit about him telling the Marines, "I want to be a close air support pilot in 'Nam!"

And they said, "No, you're going to be a computer programmer!"

It goes counter to the folklore that they ignore your background and just hand you a rifle.

I've heard the story of new recruits and their assignments told a few different ways over the years. My grandfather credited his ability to touch type with keeping him out of combat, and it's certainly possible that whoever made that decision also noticed a few other qualities that made him suitable for working in an office. On the other hand, I know a guy who was drafted in the Vietnam era after getting a BS in Physics and Astronomy and the Army's best use for him was... combat.

I don't even know the name of the position of the guy who decides where draftees are sent after basic training, but I expect that as with so many other things, some of them are a lot better at their jobs than others. And perhaps the Marines do a better job of it than the Army.

Yeah. One data point. Or "anecdote" if you will.

DG was never a mainframe company. west was trying to transform a small 16-bit mini into a 32-bit mini. De Castro, the CEO of DG at the time said he wanted that, but "no mode-bit", which shows him as being not being disconnected from his engineers. All in the book.

I'm curious about what various people think defines a mainframe. IBM people clearly have something in mind, and DEC people something else. Maybe DG had yet another definition.

I'll take a stab at a current definition.

A mainframe is a high-RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability), high-performance, high-cost, modular multiprocessor machine with specialized coprocessors; running a hypervisor-style operating system that is largely concerned with allocating resources and managing security partitions. Interconnections among modules happen at system bus latencies and bandwidths.

zabzonk is technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. I was using 'mainframe' colloquially and lazily. DG's mini line was used for the same kinds of things as mainframes, but they were formally minis at the time.

Thanks for responding, and for 'disagreeing' so respectfully. I feel honored to interact with one who was present.

I didn't mean to attack an individual, and my management comment was more general than just Tom. I saw Tom's actions as reactions to a bad situation.

My comment is more directed at the people I worked with who took the wrong message away from the SOTNM folklore. Being against the ropes and fighting for your survival at all costs isn't something to look forward to, and definitely bot something to expect from employees.

You are right that just copy-and-pasting that pace and expectations onto other development teams is (a) commonplace and (b) not a great recipe for success. I don't think SOTNM valorizes that behavior itself, but it's definitely possible to read it the wrong way and think the grind and the deathmarch are necessary or useful parts of normal development activity. Your caution is valid.

I imagine a death march to be something worse than that. In this case everyone shared the goal, it wasn't a made-up deadline forced on underlings by a clueless management. This management knew they could do it, and the team knew they could do it and had done it before. That's what they were there for; the thing they hoped to be able to do.

When I think of a death march, I think of an engineering task (usually a software program) with a known-impossible deadline, where the team pushes back on the deadline and is ignored. Necessary tools not provided, work hours monitored, rather than progress, etc.

Yeah, I agree, TSOANM isn't really about a death march.

I am abusing the term. I worked on some death marches with guys who saw themselves as Tom West though, which is probably why I chose that phrase.

A death march, to me, is a project that you know can't succeed but you are forced to go forward anyway.

I once had a boss hold the team at work until a piece of work was done (and it was 2am before it was clear it wasn't going to happen). That was just one day, but that project was a death march.

Soul, Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and Masters of Doom are my three favorite "computer product development heroics" narratives and I think they all describe toxic workplaces by the standards of 2022 and employees who aren't monomaniacs.

In their defense, a compelling book is going to select for drama, and depict it as dramatically as possible. And id Software was a small group of people who'd worked together before. Many people in the latter two books made bank.

Right?! Hi I'm Tom West's daughter, librarian, owner of MetaFilter and someone who spends a LOT of time talking to people (mainly men) who take only some of the messages away from that book. The book was great. I'm in it in a single sentence. My sister isn't in it at all. My parents divorced shortly after the book came out. My father had never "let" my mother have a job (it was a different time) and so she was ill-prepared for the single life, but made it work.

I hammered out a decent relationship with my dad despite the fact that he was basically married to his work, was probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, and had a problematic relationship with alcohol. He was a good guy but he learned interpersonal interactions somewhat by rote and in a business role where the goal was "results" he just did what he had to do. It's weird growing up when your dad's nickname is The Price of Darkness.

He wound up having a decent retirement after being a company man most of his life, got to sail a lot more, had a second messy divorce, and died in 2011. At his memorial service Tracy Kidder spoke eloquently about working with my dad through the writing of that book (he basically lived with us on weekends for a while) and how he knew the book had been good for him--he won a Pulitzer, was catapulted to some level of renown, got to write more books--but he was never quite sure it had been good for my dad. I also wonder sometimes.

So, yeah, when I talk to people who are reading it again or for the first time, I often ask them to reflect on what the book says about work/life balance, about gender norms (there's one woman in the entire coding team), about how project management should run, and about the weird cult of personality that can grow up around people who don't quite get along with people, and how things could be different.

>(there's one woman in the entire coding team)

Certainly true. Though I will say that a female engineering friend of mine--upon seeing A Year in Development (linked elsewhere on thread) created a few years later about, well, a year in development at DG--had the immediate reaction "Look at all the women!" But maybe that's more a statement about how things haven't gotten a lot better. (And many of the women, in my experience, were in project management and engineering-adjacent roles.)

When I graduated (EE, 1992), in my class there were about five women. Industrial engineering had a higher proportion, about 10%.

In the last few years, according to LinkedIn at least - and my admittedly unscientific counting, it seems 50/50.

This makes me much happier.

I wish there was a Best of HN for comments like these!

(As a MeFite, it blew my mind when I read SoaNM a few years ago and realized that Tom was your father. Small world!)

Thank you, Jessamyn, for providing your perspective. You did the same to me, privately, many years ago on MeFi and I haven't forgotten it.

I cast the same eye now on anything that romanticizes similar work, and I've even seen it in places that are somewhat unexpected. The movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a perfect example of this.

Thank you so much for sharing something so personal. I have a family myself, and as much as I love playing at being the hero at work, I always have to look around me and assess how my decisions affect those around me.

My wife "doesn't work" but does more work than I do. What I do professionally isn't possible without her.

Your comment just reaffirmed my priorities. Thank you.

Hi Jessamyn! I read Soul of a New Machine for the first time just 3 years ago, even though I’m old enough to remember seeing it in the computer section of my local library as a relatively new release. Before I read it, I saw a comment you made (on Bryan Cantrill’s blog perhaps?) similar to this one. I wanted to thank you for that, as it undoubtedly changed how I interpreted the book as I read it. It can be easy to romanticize the hard work and sacrifice portrayed in a book like that, without understanding the toll that sacrifice took on those around them.

So thank you for continuing to offer your perspective on your father and his work.

I read it in college and it had a profound impact. I swore I'd avoid that kind of pressure cooker environment. For the most part of the 30+ years of my career, I have. I've maintained a good work/life balance. Made a good living, have great family. Thanks for posting - I would never have imagined having this dialog 30 years later.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I admit I was more into the technical details and had little thoughts towards WLB and other things. I'm probably bored about my life so these "grand things" do pull towards me. On the other side I have a family so I tend to put that over everything else (Maybe that's the source of boredom?) so these books provide the drug of "grand scheme + technology" which is really my thing :)

I'm glad that you maintained an OK relationship with Tom. It could be tough relationship.

Oh man the book both glorifies but also does a good job to me of making it all look crazy, not held together, just barely going, politically isolated.

That there was a cause, a mission was do much a product of the early times, when we just didn't know as much yet, weren't nearly as professional or well set yet. That's a little less apparent.

OK, I guess it's going to be some shameless self-promotion, then, sorry:

I wrote a book (https://www.albertcory.io/inventing-the-future) that's set 7-10 years after TSOANM. Unlike Kidder, I was actually part of it. One of the reviews compares it to TSOANM, so I guess that's high praise.

Since there are already at least two non-fiction books about all that (Fumbling the Future and Dealers of Lightning) I wrote this like it was fiction, meaning with characters who get to do things and talk to each other, and don't know how it all turns out.

Nearly all the players who are still alive helped & critiqued it, and one (Dave Smith, the inventor of icons) wrote the Foreword.

Thanks for the pointer! Just bought the audiobook version of your book, looks like a great read.

Thank you, sir! The narrator (Maxwell Glick) and I did about an hour of live chat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGchbES0DhU

He did my second book, too.

Thank you sir! Already in my shopping cart.

Brad's already started a Twitter thread about it. AMA!