A book by Tracy Kidder. My rating for it is 6/10.
This book has some good parts and I reflected to many things described inside of it, but it could be much better if it wasn't that repetitive. Some biographies felt redundant. Overall, I have no regrets of reading it.
Now I know who Tom West is.
For me, this book was something like an inspiration source to me. This is why most quotations from the book can look like they don't make a lot of sense. They do, to me.
"Not everything worth doing is worth doing well" Tom West
Up until that year when he discovered the machine, his life, every way he had looked at it had seemed chaotic. He had done fairly well in a course of psychology, but in nothing else. He had proven to himself that he was an inveterate failure. Now, finally, he felt truly interested in something. He left college for a year. When he came back, he took a number of courses in electrical engineering and became a straight-A student.
It's commonplace today for programmers to stick exclusively to high-level languages and never look inside their machines. Alsing felt that they were missing something. He remembered learning assembly language during his time of midnight programming. "It was neat to learn it. I could skip the middleman and talk right to the machine. I could talk to God, just like IBM".
A classmate at Amherst remembered West as "smart — off the charts — but also naive. No, not exactly naive, but like a boy — uh, romantic. He believed in pie in the sky."
"I thought I'd get a really dumb job. I found out dumb jobs don't work. You come home too tired to do anything," he said. He remembered a seemingly endless succession of meetings out of which only the dullest, most cautious decisions could emerge. He remembered watching himself play with his thumbs beneath the edges of conference tables for hours and hours. Near the end of his time at RCA he got to work on projects that interested him. He saw a few patents registered in his name. He became what he'd pretended to be, a real computer engineer; but by then, RCA had lost a fortune trying to compete with IBM and was getting out of computers. The time to change jobs was upon West again.
The fact of a string of previous successes, though, could imply the imminence of failure. "Realistically, you gotta lose one sometime," he said with a small smile.
The AI was a hot topic at that time, just as it is today. And the questions were the same:
Claims and counterclaims about the likely effects of computers on work in America had also abounded since Weiner. Would the machines put enormous numbers of people out of work? Or would they actually increase levels of employment? By the late seventies, it appeared, they had done neither. Well, then, maybe computers would eventually take over hateful and dangerous jobs and in general free people from drudgery, as boosters like to say. Some anecdotal evidence suggested, though, that they might be used extensively to increase the reach of top managers crazed for efficiency and thus would serve as tools to destroy the last vestiges of pleasant, interesting work. Dozens of other points of argument existed. Were computers making nuclear war more or less likely? Had the society's vulnerability to accident and sabotage increased or decreased, now that computers had been woven inextricably into the management of virtually every enterprise in America?
Wallach and I retreated from the fair, to a cafe some distance from the Coliseum. Sitting there, observing the more familiar chaos of a New York City street, I was struck by how unnotice able the computer revolution was. You leave a bazaar like the NCC expecting to find that your perceptions of the world outside will have been altered, but there was nothing commensurate in sight — no cyborgs, half machine, half protoplasm, tripping down the street; no armies of unemployed, carrying placards denouncing the computer; no TV cameras watching us — as a rule, you still had to seek out that experience by going to such places as Data General's parking lot. Computers were everywhere, of course — in the cafe's beeping cash registers and the microwave oven and the jukebox, in the traffic lights, under the hoods of the honking cars snarled out there on the street (despite those traffic lights), in the airplanes overhead — but the visible differences somehow seemed insignificant.