The Soul of a New Machine

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Highlights

• 2024-10-17
  • It was a daring corporate undertaking. “We’re betting the company,” one IBM executive remarked. Indeed, the project cost somewhat more than the development of the atom bomb, but it paid off handsomely.
• 2024-10-19
  • They Say IBM’s Entry Into Minicomputers Will Legitimize The Market. The Bastards Say, Welcome.
• 2024-10-21
  • Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC’s corporate organization. He felt that VAX was too complicated.
• 2024-10-22
  • an engineer, who, upon being informed that his plans for a new machine had been scrapped by the managers of his company, got a gun and murdered a colleague whose design had been accepted.
• 2024-10-24
  • “See. He can push, but when it comes time to pop, he goes off in all directions”—which means that the poor fellow can receive and understand information but he can’t retrieve it in an orderly fashion.
  • Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing.
• 2024-10-27
  • If Job had been a computer engineer, his travail would have begun in that way.
• 2024-10-28
  • At home, he said, he mainly read Playboy. “I read the short stories. I really do! Yeah, I look at the pictures, but I like the stories.”
  • When first invented, the program for Adventure had traveled widely, like a chain letter, from coast to coast among computer engineers and buffs. It had arrived in Westborough just in time for the aftermath of the EGO wars. It was everywhere by now; grade-schoolers were playing it.
• 2024-10-29
  • “How did the computer know to do that?” “I don’t know,” said Alsing, coyly. “Sometimes it’s perceptive, other times just dumb.”
• 2024-10-30
  • In a book called Computer Power and Human Reason, a professor of computer science at MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum writes of a malady he calls “the compulsion to program.” He describes the afflicted as “bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken, glowing eyes,” who play out “megalomaniacal fantasies of omnipotence” at computer consoles; they sit at their machines, he writes, “their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice.” Was this a portrait of Alsing playing with that old IBM?
  • Most new microcoders, on their first job, have the odd feeling that what they’re doing can’t possibly be real. “I didn’t fully believe, until I saw it work, that microcode wasn’t just a lie,” said Alsing’s main submanager, Chuck Holland
  • Limited storage space forces the coder to economize—to make one microinstruction accomplish more than one task, for example. At the same time, though, the coder must take care that one microinstruction does not foul up the performance of another.
  • It was always this way with Alsing. The summer before the Eagle project began, he was assigned to write the code for a new Eclipse. As usual, he stalled, and when he felt that he was about to get in trouble, he went home with an armful of books.
  • But his habit of putting off the creation of his code until all was almost lost probably did hurt him. During his months of procrastination, he wondered why he couldn’t get down to work and came to believe that he was simply lazy, and he guessed that he let it show in little ways—an averting of the eyes, a slump in the shoulders. And partly because of that, perhaps, and certainly because of the anxiety he created, he did not receive a substantial gift of stock for his work on the Eclipse, although some other engineers got tidy rewards.
• 2024-11-08
  • 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 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 did not sing the sorts of songs that I gathered he played currently with his friends at their jam sessions, but once-popular folk songs—”The Banks of the O-hi-o” and the like. Those are seductive ballads. If you listen to them long enough, you can start believing that your way in life is strewn with possibilities.
  • “It doesn’t matter how hard you work on something,” says Holberger. “What counts is finishing and having it work.”
  • It might be a painting of a nightmare by Goya. Your eye is drawn from the young man’s face and the hand resting in his teeth, to the jagged line on the screen, which is in fact a picture of an electronic event that took place, in infinitesimal time, just a moment ago. Though it is a common sort of picture, often seen in the lab, all of a sudden it has become dreadful. But who can say why?
  • With an old friend, Rosen had once visited what he called “a very liberal arts college” in Vermont. He was strolling through something known as “an alternative-energy farm,” when a young woman, bare to the waist, walked by. “She was,” Rosen said, “a miracle of biological engineering.” He continued: “I was so stunned that I walked into the door of a geodesic dome. Although blood was pouring down the bridge of my nose, I was completely oblivious to it.”
• 2024-11-09
  • Norbert Weiner coined the term cybernetics in order to describe the study of “control and communication in the animal and the machine.” In 1947 he wrote that because of the development of the “ultra-rapid computing machine,… the average human being of mediocre attainments or less” might end up having “nothing to sell that is worth anyone’s money to buy.”
  • Someone asked: “Hey, where’s the Michelob? There was a whole case of it somewhere.” “We drank it all,” someone else confidently and proudly asserted. A little later on, a case of Michelob was handed back from seat to seat, while Alsing stood in the aisle holding forth hilariously on the perils that New York City’s massage parlors held for young men from the country.
• 2024-11-10
  • Maybe in the late 1970s designing and debugging a computer was inherently more interesting than most other jobs in industry. But to at least some engineers, at the outset, Eagle appeared to be a fairly uninteresting computer to build. Yet more than two dozen people worked on it overtime, without any real hope of material rewards, for a year and a half; and afterward most of them felt glad.
  • That happened largely because West and the other managers gave them enough freedom to invent, while at the same time guiding them toward success.
  • West added: “It was a summer romance. But that’s all right. Summer romances are some of the best things that ever happen.”