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Has anyone read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder? Could this be made into a movie? "The Soul of a New Machine is a non-fiction book written by Tracy K
by pasttense01 4y ago
Has anyone read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder? Could this be made into a movie?
"The Soul of a New Machine is a non-fiction book written by Tracy Kidder and published in 1981. It chronicles the experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure. The machine was launched in 1980 as the Data General Eclipse MV/8000.[1]
The book, whose author was described by the New York Times as having "elevated it to a high level of narrative art"[2] is "about real people working on a real computer for a real company,"[3] and it won the 1982 National Book Award for Nonfiction[4] and a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
- jtode 4y agothanks for the tip, added to the list. :>
- icedchai 4y agoI read this when I was a young teenager and found it very enjoyable (even though I didn't understand some of it at the time.) I've been thinking of rereading it.
- pinewurst 4y agoIt's an excellent book for sure, on many levels. I'm not convinced it could be turned into a _modern_ movie with enough interest to a general audience though.
- itsoktocry 4y agoWell, as a big fan of Michael Lewis, I never would have thought Moneyball and The Big Short would make good movies, but here we are. Good scriptwriters are wizards.
- ghaff 4y agoScreenwriting for The Big Short was magic. There were probably still too many complicated threads to keep straight but a really good cut on the source material for film.
- rbanffy 4y agoIt would require a very good screenwriter. Aaron Sorkin level.
- themadturk 4y agoThe key to a good movie is characters and relationships. It's been a few years since I read the book (and it is a great book), but I think there are characters galore and the opportunity to pump up relationships. It could maybe work. Yeah, if anyone could do it, Sorkin could.
- glaucon 4y agoA really good read, and actually quite instructive. I remember when they want to move the team from (I think) Massachusetts to North Carolina the response from some team members wasn't positive, I remember one commented "the news on the radio is about hog prices and you can't buy the New York Times".
- ghaff 4y agoYeah. DG was HQd in Massachusetts--about an hour west of Boston. It was a "Route 128" minicomputer company but actually just off 495. I'm not sure what was down in NC at the time but when I joined a few years later there was a manufacturing plant in Apex and, at some point, software development in Research Triangle Park. A lot of the later Unix development as well as at least databases was in RTP.
- ghaff 4y agoIt's not a focus of "the book" as it was referred to when I was at DG. But Ed de Castro was the initial designer of the PDP-8 before he went on to co-found Data General. For anyone interest in that book, this is an interesting internal year-in-the-life style book that was published a few years later. https://archive.org/details/year-in-dev https://archive.org/details/year-in-dev But, yeah, Soul of a New Machine is still relevant (even if I'm biased because I knew a lot of the people involved). Showstopper about Windows NT is another good one in a similar vein. You certainly could make a film. Not sure to what degree even geeks (especially younger ones) would connect. Times were pretty different. (I think one person who is in the book is still at the "same" company by way of EMC and Dell.)
- DougMerritt 4y agoYeah, at the time I was helping to design the CPU of a new mainframe, and everyone in the department read it excitedly because it resonated with us all. I feel like it was serialized in some industry magazine before the book itself came out, but I may be misremembering.