Tracy Kidder has died

Re:Tracy Kidder has died by galonk on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @02:17PM (#47521169)

My favorite story from the book. Working on hardware, the engineers would often have problems where the whole machine would crash because some signal happend one nanosecond too early or one microsecond too late.

Eventually one of the engineers broke. He left and never came back. He left a note on his desk reading "I am going to live on a farm in Vermont, and I will no longer deal with any unit of time shorter than a season."

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Re:Tracy Kidder has died by rjsw on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @03:04PM (#47521737)

That engineer didn't give up for very long, he designed a different 32-bit machine for Computervision fairly soon after, it is featured in the AMD PAL book from the early 80s.

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Re:Tracy Kidder has died by mzs on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @03:24PM (#47521996)

indeed: B. Joshua Rosen https://www.polybus.com/hdlmaker/Resume.html

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Re:Tracy Kidder has died by markus_zhang on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @03:15PM (#47521890)

I read it from a newspaper, or a magazine that the said engineer clarified that the reason given in the book is inaccurate. I couldn't find it right now, but the gist is: "I had different ideas with my manager, and the other company offered me a chance to lead the design of a new computer.".

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