The Soul Of A New Machine

by Wojciech Adam Koszek   ⋅   Mar 27, 2012   ⋅   East Palo Alto, CA

If you're a computer geek like myself, and you like reading engineering post-mortems, this book is for you. Hord of people bunched together to work on the complex engineering product. This will be cool for you, unless you work in tech, in which case better stories you'll hear from your lab technicians.


Reading about good old days is something I enjoy in my free time. Getting to know history of computer is something that compensates my general lack of history knowledge, I believe. Not only does the history help you prevent mistakes from the past, but it also inspires to reuse some of the ideas of early giants.

“The Soul Of A New Machine” I found on 2010 on the shelves of unowned books in my company, but I didn’t really have a motivation to read it back then. I saved a title on my Amazon Wishlist.

I decided to get a copy of it in 2012 and read it. Very pleasant and entertaining lecture.

The Eagle Project is an excellent history from the backstage, “kitchen” side of view. We’re talking about serious engineering here: CPU consisting multiple PCBs and wire connections in between them.

Except actual design problems, guys had to solve lots of “loose PCB” issues, as well as social problems related with high turnaround in the later months.

Very entertaining at the beginning, but I just couldn’t finish it. Get pretty boring by the end.

Nice historical study.


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About the author: I'm Wojciech Adam Koszek. I like software, business and design. Poland native. In Bay Area since 2010.   More about me