I worked at DG during its last four years. I briefly encountered Mr. West a couple of times. His aura was palpable in the hallways. He remains a legend among DG alumni.
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. I read the Kidder book in high-school, and it was definitely a factor that motivated me to get involved with computers and this industry. Feeling a tinge of nostalgia, I went back and re-read it a few months ago... and found that it stands the test of time well. It's a very interesting read, even if the technology has moved on considerably since the Data General days. And I still wish I'd had the chance to meet Tom West, but sadly, 'twas not to be.
That book is probably the most significant reason I'm a tech entrepreneur today. It also partially funded my first startup, indirectly. I researched and ended up investing in Data General, because of the book. It was acquired by EMC about a year after I invested, and I made a very nice profit. That, plus Netbank and Sano (acquired by Elan) added up to the $30k, or so, that I used to start my first company.
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.
For me, that book will always mark the standard for technical journalism. Compare the depth of research of the Kidder book to today's techcrunch, or any of the dozens of books written about Google and you can see how far this generation of journalists have yet to go.
"'What he told them was that if you win at this level, then your reward is that you get to play again at the next level, but guess what: The next level is more difficult,' said Don McDougall of Palo Alto, Calif., a former vice president of technical products at Data General."
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.
"Soul of a New Machine" was practically required reading when I was at Convex (where Steve Wallach, interviewed for the article, went to be CTO post-DG.)
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 posted this a few days ago, but it sunk like a stone. I'm glad to see it getting the attention here it deserves.
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...
Sorry to hear this. I read this book as a kid and it has had a pronounced influence on my life and career. Never had a chance to work on any of the systems, but the ideas and excitement around the technical guts of the system inspired me.
Tom West captured the essence of what motivates me to work, and what I find motivates most of the incredible people I've had the opportunity to work with:
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 used an MV/8000 ("Eagle") when I was writing video game cartridges for Atari. I never really programmed it -- maybe a little scripting in their shell -- but just used it for cross-development to some home computers. The system rarely crashed.
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.
The equivalent of TECO was "speed", no? I actually used it in an elaborate CLI macro ("cockamamie" may be juster than "elaborate" here) because I had no better way to do what I needed.
I used the MV/8000 and its successors (up to the MV/20000) and predecessors (back to the Eclipse S/330?) back when. I still remember some of the CLI and a bit of Eclipse assembler.
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.