The Soul of Some New Vaporware
Monday, January 22nd, 2007Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine was one of the great nonfiction hits of the early 1980s, a gripping blow-by-blow account of how Data General developed the Eclipse minicomputer. Many people originally viewed it as a description of how high-tech projects ought to work.
Later it came to be seen as more of a cautionary tale. The Eclipse was never a great success in the market and the engineers who created it were burned out by the project. Most ended up getting divorced and leaving the company. And Data General itself seems to have vanished from the face of the Earth. I have no idea what happened to it, but I haven’t heard any mention of it for many years.
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