I read Soul of a New Machine in college, and then wound up working for a company that actually used the machine that the book was about (the Eclipse MV/8000) fo

I read Soul of a New Machine in college, and then wound up working for a company that actually used the machine that the book was about (the Eclipse MV/8000) for cross-development of video games. This was 1982. I was used to a Unix-and-Emacs-on-a-VT100 environment, and while the MV/8000 didn't run Unix or have a port of Emacs, its OS and DG's standard screen editor were surprisingly pleasant to use, and the shell was pretty nice. It even had a C compiler (a big deal for the time). My only issue was that the department I was in used the machine for regular office work as well as engineering, and it was heavily loaded during the day with a bunch of terrible "office" software. My assembles took 45 minutes turnaround during the day, but only 5 minutes at night, and guess who didn't see the sun for their first six months at Atari? If you liked this book, I also recommend: Lundstrom's A Few Good Men from Univac (essentially a biography of Seymour Cray) Murray's The Supermen (well . . . ditto :-) )