RIP: Tom West (Data General, "Soul of a New Machine")
articles.boston.com
articles.boston.com
Around 1998, West started a new internet focused business unit called THiiNLINE. One of the unit's products was an embedded Linux based wireless router for the home. As a lucky beta-tester, I enjoyed wireless laptop access to my dialup internet connection well before such devices became common. At the time, THiiNLINE was considered a crazy venture. The past thirteen years have proven that West's vision was on the right track.
I had the extreme good fortune of having a Microkid as my mentor for seven years. I learned a ton from him and like to think that I picked up some of the "The Soul of a New Machine" ethos. For that, I will always be thankful to Mr. West and the Eagle group he created.
RIP, Mr. West.
So, a pretty good book, all around. West, and the rest of the Data General crew, were heroes to me during my entrepreneurial formative years.
That's great insight into how to motivate people to do their best.
I read the book The Soul of a New Machine many years ago, but already long enough after it was published that the technology sounded a bit primitive. It was a grippingly good read, a glimpse into how different personalities mesh to solve a tough technical problem.
To say that the culture of Mostek and DG influenced Convex would be gross understatement.
I learned a lot at my first "real job" in the industry. I've never found anyplace as "good" to work since. (Nor am I alone in expressing this.)
I met Tom a number of times-- I'm friends with his daughter-- and he was a hell of a guy. I'm glad the obit mentioned a few of his non-IT related adventures...
/me raises a glass in toast.
An engineer's essential desire, after all, is to design and build a machine and see it through to completion, but completion itself is therefore not the ultimate reward. In the Eagle days, West called this paradox "pinball." In pinball, he reasoned, the prize for winning is getting to play again. The story of the Eagle engineers since Soul is one of a career-length version of pinball.
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 from the cave, supplying that information: “Ok. It’s right. Ship it.”
He would bind his team with mutual trust, he had decided. When a person signed up to do a job for him, he would in turn trust that person to accomplish it; he wouldn’t break it down into little pieces and make the task small, easy and dull.
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.
I had the opportunity to use some Data General Machines in the 1980s..fine machines, reliable, etc...
I am the only older one here that remembers using the machines?
I was used to 4.2 bsd, but the DG was still a nice system. It got bogged down during the day with 40-50 users running an awful little email and office automation app, but it was fine at night (just like the mainframe at my university).
The shell struck me as a cross between VAX/VMS and Unix. The file system was pretty decent. The screen editor that DG provided worked well, and though I missed Emacs, it was adequate for writing largish programs. (There was a DG equivalent of TECO that I tried to learn, but it was about as opaque and terse ("badly designed") as the original TECO and I just gave it up after a while).
All in all, I was pleasantly surprised with how well it worked.