Although Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize winner, The Soul Of A New Machine, was written 28 years ago, it has withstood the test of time. It speaks to early days of the computer industry and the culture that was booming in the 1970s, when companies such as Digital Equipment, Wang and Data General were spreading out from Boston and into its suburbs along the Mass Turnpike and Route 9 - the old post road to Worcester, where I went to engineering school - and on the original Route 128 corridor and out to Marlboro, Westborough and the outer beltway of Interstate 495.

Focusing in on Data General and their Eagle project, this book captures the pulse and personality of a period of time in my life, along with a regional history that I had been associated with and had somehow completely forgotten about. I, like most who had been exposed to this time and place, had been overtaken by the extraordinary dynamics that defined the computer revolution until a doctor friend of mine, who had also lived in the area during this period, recently shared this fascinating bit of nostalgia with me. It reminded me of the engineers and technicians that I had initially worked with within the government, who were tracking the competing minicomputer and microcomputer developments that led to modern desktop computers. I'd forgotten about learning how to read paper tapes and how to perform square roots using a Frieden electromechanical calculator.

Kidder's intimacy with the team and its members offers us a sense of their motivation, dedication and enthusiasm that's not typically what we see in our industries today. It was quite exciting and it brought to mind two other computer books that I recommend that also gave me insight into the people dimensions of these technologies during the course of my career, Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason from Judgment to Calculation in 1976 and Levy's Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything in 2000. I found only passing comments among the Data General engineers with regard to the ultimate uses of these general purpose machines and more of the optimism of youth in their quests to build the machines. It is also interesting to note that while technology trends eventually saw the mighty Data General fall by the wayside, Ray Ozzie, a product of that period and a former software developer at Data General during this timeframe, is now the chief software architect for Microsoft.

Maybe because I'm an engineer from the era, I saw this as an interesting people story and a good picture of the technology then... so I really liked it, but so did Dr. Tom! Hopefully, that same type of youthful energy will insure a better future for all of us.

Bob Magnant writes about politics and technology and is the author of 'The Last Transition...', a fact-based Internet tale.

The team Tracy Kidder follows through the creation of a new minicomputer built hardware that was obsolete within a year or two of its creation. However, the result of Kidder's labor shows that the social structures they worked in and the processes they followed are uncommonly close to those we still see today. Anyone who works with machines - or, for that matter, with other people - will find something in common with this team.