Tracy Kidder wrote his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Soul of a New Machine [1] in 1981. It is a non-fiction book about a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer. Since then, we have had dozens of “next generation” computers, and the pace doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. But while the computers have changed significantly since the Eclipse MV/8000, Kidder’s enduring story of the soul of the engineers remains relevant today.
The computer engineers of the late 1970’s were well paid, and the lucky ones were able to capture some nice profits from their creations. But this was before the days when Internet millionaires became common place. Current stories often focus on business models, seed funding, and capitalization. The computer industry, however, still relies on the engineers who share a passion for building that next machine– and that hasn’t changed since 1980.
To quote an African medical doctor who once visited his colleague in the United States: “You live like kings, but you work like slaves”. That behavior is common across many disciplines of human endeavor, including computer engineering. We know our lives are finite, but many of us are driven to consume ourselves in the pursuit of our life’s work.
So why do we work so hard on the “next-generation” of whatever? In the words of Tracy Kidder:
“They believed in the rule of pinball: if you win, you get to play again”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
