Kidder, Epilogue

pages 288 - 291

As a parting shot about motivation, Kidder notes that a regional sales manager asks sales personnel the rhetorical question "What motivates people?" and answers "Ego and the money to buy things that they and their families want."

Do you feel that's true for those in sales? For the engineers on the Eagle team?

By "The Soul of a New Machine," Kidder surely means the people who created it. Indeed, the people in any engineering project, not the technical aspects, are always the key element. As we mentioned earlier, people sometimes have the impression that interpersonal skills are relatively unimportant for engineers, who presumably deal mainly with technical matters. Nothing could be further from the truth. During a project, engineers spend far more time dealing with people than struggling alone with technical issues. A corollary is that engineers who wish to be successful and derive the most pleasure from their work simply must learn to work successfully with other people. Those who do not are doomed to limited success and persistent unhappiness.

The Soul of a New Machine

In 1982, Tracy Kidder won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for The Soul of a New Machine. Subsequently, Kidder has written several more books in which he "lives with" a group of people for a period time and then writes their story. His most recent book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, tells of Dr. Paul Farmer, a physician who grew up in a ramshackle old bus in the Deep South, catapulted himself out of the Florida swamps to a full scholarship at Duke and later to Harvard Medical School, and now divides his time between a post at a prominent Boston hospital and a medical practice in the impoverished communities of Haiti.

After peaking in 1984, Data General declined steadily in size and sales. See Saving the Soul of an Old Machine.

In 1990, the Data General Board of Directors forced out Ed de Castro, one of the founders, from his position as CEO. His major sin: missing the desktop computing market.

In 1998, Tom West retired from Data General, although he continues to work for Data General as a consultant. A 1996 profile of West in a Uniforum publication relates some of his activities at Data General after the days of the book. According to an article entitled O, Engineers! in the December, 2000, issue of Wired, Tom West, since retiring from Data General, spends more time on his boat, off the coast of Westport, Massachusetts.

In 1998, Compaq bought out DEC.

In 1999, EMC acquired Data General.

According to e-mail correspondence with Carl Alsing during 1997, he and Ed Rasala left Data General and went to Tandem Computers in Cupertino, CA. After 4 years, Alsing went to the Palantir Corporation, a startup, and developed an omni-font OCR (Optical Character Recognition) product. Subsequently, he went to Caere (subsequently acquired by ScanSoft) where he worked on Omnipage, and then to Xerox, where he worked on TextBridge, an OCR product now owned Scansoft. He grew tired of management and the "Dilbert Zone" of politics in the corporate life and has worked as a consultant and served as a volunteer chaplain in a hospital. Alsing also maintains a Web site that helps people make intelligent choices about mail-order purchases of satellite dishes, although he does not sell them. Rasala returned to Tandem (now a divison of Compaq) after spending some time at Risc. According to an article entitled O, Engineers! in the December, 2000, issue of Wired, Carl Alsing is technical director of advanced development at MagnaWare, an optical character recognition company in Santa Cruz, California, while Ed Rasala is program manager for Compaq's industry standard server group in Silicon Valley.

In a new introduction to The Soul of a New Machine, (Modern Library, New York, 1997, ISBN 0-679-60261-5, page x), Tracy Kidder includes the following paragraph about Carl Alsing:

I ended up in the basement of an austere building among a group of engineers, led by a rather mysterious man named Tom West. They were building a new computer. I'm not sure I would have stayed around to watch it if, very early on, I hadn't been introduced to a lieutenant of West's named Carl Alsing. He was an expert in the writing of the intricate, fundamental instructions called microcode, which lie inside all computers, but he had grown a little bored with that. He had become more interested in observing the behavior of the people around him. He welcomed me warmly, out of a kind of loneliness, I now believe -- I was someone who should be interested in what he'd been observing. Alsing led me to a corner of the company cafeteria, to a place where he hoped not to be overheard, and described the history of the project then in progress -- to build the computer that the engineers had code-named "Eagle." That name and the lingo Alsing used were of a piece. He talked about people who "shot from the hip," about "blood on the floor." Here was an engineer, of all people, using an inflated, highly charged vocabulary, talking about enmity and wounded pride, about mysterious manipulations and vaunting ambitions, and as near as I could tell, all this had to do with the creation of an immobile metal and plastic box. This seemed interesting.

In 1995, Steve Wallach was elected to the National Academy of Engineering "For the creation of systems approaches leading to affordable supercomputers." Earlier, he was a co-founder of Convex Computer Corporation in Dallas. In 1995, when Hewlett Packard bought out Convex, he became the chief technology officer of the HP Convex Technology Center. According the article O, Engineers! in the December, 2000, issue of Wired, Steve Wallach is a venture capitalist and vice president of Chiaro Networks, an optical networking company in Richardson, Texas.

Neal Firth subsequently worked as a consultant. In 1998, he provided some throughtful advice to students, as well as answers to questions, based on his career experiences. At a gathering of some of the Eagle team on the occasion of Tom West's retirement, Firth reports that "Tracy asked the rest of us if we'd do it again if we knew then what we know now. Without hesitation, all present said yes. Tracy then asked how many of us had had another engineering experience that was equal to Eagle days. Without hesitation, all present said that nothing had even come close." Today, Neal Firth is President and founder of SageRight, a consulting firm that specializes in providing solutions to software development organizations for the management and control of information from development through sales.

Josh Rosen works as a consultant and is Vice President, and co-founder, of Polybus Systems Corporation.

Betty Shanahan is Executive Director of the Society of Women Engineers.

In the article O, Engineers! in the December, 2000, issue of Wired, author Evan Ratliff gives an interesting retrospective of the The Soul of a New Machine and tells what some additional people mentioned in it were doing in the year 2000:

Bob Beauchamp, 44: Manager in the advance development group at Data General, a division of EMC.
Jonathan Blau, 44: Junk bond analyst for Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (now merged with Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB), in New York City.
Jim Guyer, 46: Director of hardware architecture at Data General, a division of EMC.
Ken Holberger, 46: President and CEO of XStream Logic (now Clearwater Networks), a networking company in Los Gatos, California.
Chuck Holland, 48: Product evangelist for LiveVault, an Internet backup-services company in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
Dave Keating, 47: Software and firmware engineer at the R&D headquarters of Quantum, a disk-drive maker, in Massachusetts.
Dave Peck, 51: Consultant in the systems engineering department at Fujitsu Nexion in Acton, Massachusetts.
Rosemarie Seale, 69: Office manager of the information systems office at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
Jim Veres, 46: Engineering manager in Microsoft's multimedia division.