The Soul of an Old Machine | Hacker News Reader

The Soul of an Old Machine

skalski.dev

78 pointsmskalski20 comments

I also have a few machines I'm attached to. When I was fresh out of school I got a job at a startup writing PHP and bought myself an (at the time) brand new Thinkpad X220 with a Sandy Bridge i7 inside.

My 9 year old has it now. The battery is toast but the machine still faithfully trundles along. It plays Rollercoaster Tycoon on Fedora Linux. We're building a robot together for her birthday, so I'll be trying to install the Arduino tool chain on it.

I'll definitely miss that machine when it's no more.

Hmm. The desktop I'm using right now has an i7 in it and I do everything with it. Hmm.

Which generation? Just i7 by itself doesn't mean much. I think the newest are like 14th generation? The X220 is only 2nd generation ("Sandy Bridge"), about 15 years old.

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz (3403.48-MHz K8-class CPU). I think that's Ivy Bridge. I just don't pay attention. I think it's a year newer with a smaller die.

Oh yeah that's not so recent either, but it helps that it's a desktop version. Yours has 4 cores, whereas for example my 7th gen i7 (Kaby Lake) laptop only has 2.It's about 10 years old, but still enough for everything I use it for. I am always impressed how much you can do with older hardware.

Not sure what your two "Hmm"'s are implying, but the i7 label has been reapplied to newer chips as time goes on, which is why I specified it was a Sandy Bridge-era chip.

Lumia 920 for me, obsolete but I keep one around

I’ve held onto FireWire for long and feel attached to it. I’ve used it for over 25 years.

I think I feel the same way about TiVo and fear the day the guide stops updating or the motherboard fails (everything else in the box is replaceable).

These things are ephemeral in the grand scheme of history, but when they are embedded in workflows and habits for decades I find it hard to let go.

I still need to read “The Soul of a New Machine”, should I save this until after?

Should be compulsory reading. Actually, now that I think about it, this would make a great interview question in the AI era: “what did you think of Soul of a new machine?”

I found Showstopper! even more compelling

Those two books are probably the two best about tech projects I've ever read. I worked at Data General as a product manager for about 13 years and know many of the individuals although I joined a few years after the book was written.

What strikes me is the stories that never get told. I met a retiree at a Java meetup once who had worked at Zilog during the z8000 era. He was surprised to meet someone who knew about that.

Especially, pre-web and pre-blogs there's a great deal of tech industry history that largely doesn't exist any longer unless it was especially notable and/or some author decided to spend a year or two writing about it.

Cool thanks for the recommendation!

Honestly, when I read this book in 1982 or so it changed the trajectory of my life and career. It is an story of a bet-the-business project that occurred in real life. After reading I though I was late to the tech party, missed out on so much, and yet, here we are, 45 years later with incredible advancements and a career I couldn't have imagined. Tracy Kidder was a gem of an individual, just a wonderful person who was truly interested in others. I hope you'll read the book soon.

Stop reading HN and read the book now. You’re welcome. ;)

It's unrelated to the book, other than the title.

Soul of a New machine is a great read, never slow or self-gratifying, highly recommended

That's a great book to read, after that pick up The Cuckoo's Egg.

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