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Comment by johnohara | Hacker News Reader

Before "The Soul of a New Machine."

Silently and spastically splaying taut fingers to get you the fuck out of his office and stop interrupting a man who works for a living, the great Tom West past 19 May 2011:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_West

I actually just finish reading that and it's what lead me to this!

Here's a picture of the Eclipse MV/8000 "Eagle", the machine they were building in the book:

http://www.foxdata.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Data-...

"The Soul of a New Machine" is a great book, by the way, even if the technology in it is a bit old at this point. Hackers of hardware and/or software should definitely read it.

Another interesting book about the creation of a large system is "Show-stopper", by G. P. Zachary, which describes the building of Windows NT.

Does anybody know more about FHP (the Fountainhead Project) than what little I can read here:

http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fhp.html

Here's an account of the Fountainhead Project written by Rich Wingerter, who was a programmer working on the project:

http://www.sonic.net/~richw/FHP.html

While searching for this I also found an interesting paper on the Eagle project:

"Flight of the Eagle: The Birthing and Life of a Super-Minicomputer" (1996)

http://www.faughnan.com/papers/eaglecomp.pdf

It's not just computer nerds who thought that The Soul of a New Machine was a great book. Tracy Kidder received the Pulitzer Prize for it.

But that Eclipse picture is boring. Here's how a computer should look. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:360-91-panel.jpg

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