Two Books Worth Reading

By Bruce Preston

The Soul of a New Machine
by Tracy Kidder

Our PCs and Macs etc. are categorized as micro-computers.   The room-sized computers are categorized as mainframes.  There is also a less-familiar category called mini-computers; these are physically about the same size as a desk or large filing cabinet.  In the 70’s and 80’s these were common for production control, accounting, etc.  They typically supported a dozen or so ‘dumb terminals’.  Probably the best known brand of mini-computer was Digital Equipment Corporation, “DEC” – but there were others and most of the companies making mini-computers were within the 128 beltway around Boston.

Data General was a manufacturer of mini-computers – at the time of the start of the book their product line was 16-bit architecture.  This limited the amount of memory and instruction set, and thus the number of users and/or complexity of the application programs.  The CEO announced that he was sending ‘our best and brightest engineers’ to a new facility at Research Triangle Park (North Carolina) for the purpose of developing a new 32-bit product line.  This did not go over well with those left behind to maintain the current 16-bit product line.

Somehow the author, Tracy Kidder, got permission to become a ‘fly on the wall’ and went inside Data General to chronicle the development of a 32-bit machine by the 16-bit engineering team.  They had convinced management to let them have a shot at it by promising to deliver a machine capable of supporting existing 16-bit applications simultaneously with new 32-bit applications, something the RTP team was not going to attempt.  Such a capability would be an enormous cost benefit to their existing customers as they would not have to purchase updated software, or re-write applications developed in house.  Kidder covered the entire development cycle from project proposal to machine roll-out.  Kidder won a Pulitzer Prize for this book.

The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage
by Clifford Stoll

This book tells a true story of computer espionage.  The author was an astronomy graduate student at University of California, Berkley.  His funding ran out, so he got a paid position in the IT department.  On the first day he was given a rather mundane assignment – find out why there was a $0.75 discrepancy between the Unix operating system’s accounting records and the UC-Berkley’s accounting records.

At the time, the internet was still a closed system, available only to educational institutions, the military, and selected industrial entities supporting the military.  This was also the era of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as “Star Wars”.  Over a period of time Stoll developed techniques to first detect the intruder, and then track the intruder’s circuitous route and method of gaining supervisory permissions on various intermediate computers.  He ultimately was responsible for identifying an international spy ring leading to their arrest and conviction.

 




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