Cray was a legend in computers, and in the movie Cray said that he liked to hire inexperienced engineers right out of school, because they do not usually know what’s supposed to be impossible. West liked that idea. He also realized, of course, that new graduates command smaller salaries than experienced engineers. Moreover, using novices might be

Where did the risks lie? Where could a company go badly wrong? In many cases, a small and daily growing computer company did not fall on hard times because people suddenly stopped wanting to buy its products. On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxiate on its own success. Demand for its products would be soaring, and the owners would

What goes on here is not part of the real world.” “How so?” “Mmmmmmmmmh. The language is different.” Some of it was, and a phrase book, such as the Penguin Dictionary of Computers, could be useful. ECO—each letter pronounced—meant “engineering change order.” Hence this remark: “A friend of mine told his girlfriend they had to ECO their

“One never explicitly plays by these rules.” And West remarked that there was no telling which rules might be real, because only de Castro made the rules that counted, and de Castro was once quoted as saying, “Well, I guess the only good strategy is one that no one else understands.”

IBM set up two main divisions, each one representing the other’s main competition.

West came to Data General in 1974, joining Carl Alsing and the other engineers who were attempting to bring the first Eclipse to life. To Alsing, West appeared to be just a good, competent circuit designer, but strikingly adept at finding and fixing the flaws in a computer. “A great debugger,” Alsing considered him. “He was so fast in the lab I

By the mid-1960s, a trend that would become increasingly pronounced was already apparent: while the expense of building a computer’s hardware was steadily declining, the cost of creating both user and system software was rising. In an extremely bold stroke, IBM took advantage of the trend. They announced, in the mid-sixties, all at one time, an

Software compatibility is a marvelous thing. That was the essential lesson West took away from his long talks with his friend in Marketing. You didn’t want to make a machine that wasn’t compatible, not if you could avoid it. Old customers would feel that since they’d need to buy and create all new software anyway, they might as well look at what

Some of the engineers closest to West suspected that if he weren’t given a crisis to deal with once in a while, he would create one. To them he seemed so confident and happy in an emergency.