May 312011
Over the weekend, I read that Tom West passed away. The Tracy Kidder book, The Soul of A New Machine, chronicled the creation of a microcomputer at Data General in the late 1970s. I still own the copy that my parents gave me in high school. 20 years later, I still think about the engineers that worked on that machine. The Soul of A New Machine was one of the reasons why I became a software engineer, and Tom West was a role model.