The Soul of a New Machine

Wow I loved this. It's 1979 and a rag-tag team of engineers is on their way of hacking out a new 32-bit minicomputer (then the size of a couple of fridges) in the basement the Data General in Massachusetts. And a journalist gets to watch. The dust jacket reads, Kidder wrote the book “with a reporter's eye, a novelist' heart, and a technician's understanding” and it's all that and more. It's about wire-wrapped prototype boards and chasing bugs, management styles and team motivation, burning out and finding new drives, vivid portraits of people full of excitement for building something new and innovative.