The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

Author:Tracy Kidder [Kidder, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780316491976
Publisher: Boston : Back Bay Books, 2000.
Published: 2000-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

THE WONDERFUL MICROMACHINES

To almost everything they touched, the Microteam attached their prefix. The office that four of them shared, sitting virtually knee to knee, had a sign on the door that said The Micropit; the room in which they held their weekly meeting was the micro- conference room. They gave out microawards and Carl Alsing had his microporch. One of them owned a van, which became the microbus. That winter several of them would go out riding in it on Friday afternoons, when West held his own weekly meetings with his managers. Then, in the first warm days of spring, they created the outdoor microlounge, to which they now repaired on those Friday afternoons.

Near one corner of the back of Building 14A/B, down a steep, man-made, earthern embankment, lay a narrow slice of woods. It must have been a pasture once. An old stone wall ran through it. Several flat rocks had been removed and propped against the wall in such a way as to fashion the crude seats and backs of micro- chairs. The sky promised rain, and the leaves not yet being out, the lounge lay in full view of the camera mounted on the corner of the roof high above, but the several Microkids who gathered there didn't seem to notice the weather or the camera. Their mood was altered. Reclining, they talked about computers and other social issues.

"Our nightmare is that you keep getting faults."

"We have to do this project on the fly."

"Yeah, we're all flying."

"No, if you page-fault you have to look for it, but if you can't find it you have to page-fault to find it and you can't page-fault until you find it. That can happen with a stack fault, too. It's a basic kind of crock."

"Sure. There's always a way to kill a computer."

"We should build a trap that'll let us in, for fun, at the end."

"That's a nice concept, leaving a trapdoor for later, but a real purist would want to get into a machine built by someone else."

"Well, there aren't too many machines in this place that we can't control."

"What does it mean to understand a computer?' I inquired. "Knowing where all the electrons go?"

"Maybe the electrons aren't in the computer at all. They just turn on the lights."

"Electrons are mathematical abstractions. So who can talk about electrons? We speak about electrons loosely."

Everybody laughed and laughed, until, it seemed, everyone forgot what they were laughing about. One Microkid started talking about a model of computer that was ten years old. He said, "They're really ancient." Uttered there, beside the crumbling stone wall, the statement sounded odd.

"I've been here since seven," said one of the team, apropos of nothing.

"I've been here since January," said another.

A couple were discussing solar energy, the military-industrial complex and education. Engineering school was awfully specialized; meanwhile, the liberal arts were in decline. "Liberal arts, they're not economically viable," said one.

"Does that mean you should restructure education or restructure society?" said the other.

"You should restructure society. That's for sure.

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