The Soul of A New Machine

“With Tom, it’s the last two percent that counts. What I now call ‘the ability to ship product’—to get it out the door.”

“West brought us out of our depression into the honesty of pure work. He put new life into a lot of people’s jobs, I think.”

there’s no such thing as a perfect design. Most experienced computer engineers I talked to agreed that absorbing this simple lesson constitutes the first step in learning how to get machines out the door. Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West was the voice f

Cray was a legend in computers, and in the movie Cray said that he liked to hire inexperienced engineers right out of school, because they do not usually know what’s supposed to be impossible. West liked that idea. He also realized, of course, that new graduates command smaller salaries than experienced engineers. Moreover, using novices might be a

West invented the term, not the practice—was “signing up.” By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success. You agreed to forsake, if necessary, family, hobbies, and friends—if you had any of these left (and you might not if you had signed up too many times before). From a manager’s point of view, the practical vir

West came to Data General in 1974, joining Carl Alsing and the other engineers who were attempting to bring the first Eclipse to life. To Alsing, West appeared to be just a good, competent circuit designer, but strikingly adept at finding and fixing the flaws in a computer. “A great debugger,” Alsing considered him. “He was so fast in the lab I fel

Where did the risks lie? Where could a company go badly wrong? In many cases, a small and daily growing computer company did not fall on hard times because people suddenly stopped wanting to buy its products. On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxiate on its own success. Demand for its products would be soaring, and the owners would b

By the mid-1960s, a trend that would become increasingly pronounced was already apparent: while the expense of building a computer’s hardware was steadily declining, the cost of creating both user and system software was rising. In an extremely bold stroke, IBM took advantage of the trend. They announced, in the mid-sixties, all at one time, an ent

He also said: “No one ever pats anybody on the back around here. If de Castro ever patted me on the back, I’d probably quit.”