My own tech career started off in the MIT/Kendall Sq area in '73, working out of a small office of a much bigger software company. I first worked for a Silicon Valley startup in '82, did more work here on contract in the 80s, and ended up moving permanently to the Bay Area in '87 when the Boston tech industry started crashing. Plus, I'm black, so I have a weird perspective.
There never was one "tech" culture in either Silicon Valley, or Boston for that matter. There were many intersecting cultures that happened to be a function of whether you worked for big defense or business corporations, or for the smaller upstarts and startups, permanent or contract, gender, race and/or nationality. For those who don't know, Boston had a lot of women, Asians, and other minorities working in tech from the beginning. SV was essentially all white/male until the 90s (and now isn't a lot better except for far more Asians). Since I always preferred to work as a hands-on coder for smaller companies until I'd had enough by '05, the standard uniform was pretty much always T-shirt and jeans. Only wannabe managers and/or HYP grads would ever dress in any of the styles pictured above.
John also came along too late to have experienced some of the fun earlier Boston/SV Religious Experiences, including Dianetics, Randism, Neuro Linguistic Programming, EST, one or more of which infected most of my coding friends at various points in time. And, we mustn't forget the founding religion of Silicon Valley, eugenics.
Anyway, here's a Tom West related story. I met this guy Dave at WPI, we were both in the class of '76 and he'd been in my circle of friends from the beginning of freshman year. Dave was one of those genius engineers, got his EE degree in '75 and started working at DG that summer. He did some peripheral device interfaces, then he ended up on a "legacy" team of three that was to design the last product in the Nova product line, the Nova 4. This was also the just time the much larger Fountain Head Project got started.
The lead was a "veteran" ASIC/hardware designer (who was still under 30 IIRC) who'd just finished up being on the MicroNova chip design team, they also had a microcode guy. They used four of the then new 4 bit CPU slices from National Semi, along with designs for custom ASICs, and had a prototype CPU in a few months that was several times faster than the fastest Nova and could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost. Once that was more or less ready to go they tweaked the design, added the missing instructions, and ended up with an Eclipse that was also faster/cheaper than any to that point. Then they proposed prototyping a 32 bit board and implementing the intended FHP instruction set, which finally stepped on the wrong toes.
End result, the Nova 4 and Eclipse S/140 announced were running at 50% design clock speed to avoid cannibalizing sales of the remaining Nova/Eclipse models. They were also told that FHP did not need their help. Just before the Nova 4 was announced in '78, the three of them quit and started the Boston area office for MOS Technology (the 6502 folks). There were lots of orders for the newer cheaper Nova and Eclipse models and last minute changes needed, but all of the engineers had just quit. So, production was delayed by months, resulting in many lawsuits and loss of sales. And, that is how they almost killed DG before the launch of the MV/8000 documented in Soul of a New Machine..
They ended up doing several toy application specific microcontrollers that went into blinking/beeping/musical Hasbro toys of the era. Dave got bored with that, went to law school in Berkeley, and became an associate patent attorney at Cooley Godward. Around 2016 he went full MAGA, we ended our friendship, and last I knew he had his own law firm in Texas.
Some day I'll tell the story of how a backup team of 10 with weirdly diverse backgrounds managed to produce a working digital typesetter layout system on Sun 2 workstations in six months, just in time for the once in 5 year World Printing Convention, then most of us got fired (or contract terminated) for our efforts. Whereas, the big printer companies flagship development team of 20 guys failed to produce anything despite having worked on it for 4 years, and ended up taking over our code.
I'm largely but not entirely in agreement with you that "there never was one 'tech' culture in either Silicon Valley or Boston." The overlappingness of various tech subcultures is one of the things I was trying to get at. But is there in fact one overall 'culture' of which these subcultures are a part? I guess that depends on how one defines 'culture'. (My B.A. is in cultural anthropology, and I once spent lots and lots of time studying & thinking about questions like this. But these days I'm happy to just leave the question open.)
It's funny that I 'came along too late,' when I started working in tech at the a decade or more before many readers of this post were born! But as to your points about Dianetics, NLP, EST, etc, I think you may enjoy my essay on Varieties of Silicon Valley Religious experiences, which mentions all of these things. I plan to publish it to my substack later today.
And finally, your tale of VLSI design & corporate intrigue is the kind of story that is, to a certain kind of person — a person like me, that is — endlessly fascinating. I wrote a whole novel that starts with a similar king of thing on page one. I never heard, or have long since forgotten, that story about the micronova, etc. But one of my first technical writing assignments at Data General, after I had been there a few months, was to overhaul the microNova assembly language programming manual.
Data General had, in those days, an entire money-making division in Southboro that offered instruction to its customers. I attended their 2-week course in Nova assembly language programming, and it was one of the most educationally beneficial two weeks of my life. Before I took that class I basically had no idea how a computer really worked. But by the end of two weeks I had written a program, in assembler, such that on a naked machine -- one with no operating system running -- if you typed an 'A' on the keyboard, an "A" appeared on the screen. And if you can do that, you pretty much know what a computer is. Everything else is just details.
Bought my copy last week.
On issues #1 & #2, would there be any objections to digitizing one of those physical copies and making them available as PDFs or something similar?
I will forward your question to David Temkin.
I’m officially switching my view of Seven Degrees of John Sundman from “whose else is he a first degree” to “who the hell isn’t?” Tom Fucking West?
My own tech career started off in the MIT/Kendall Sq area in '73, working out of a small office of a much bigger software company. I first worked for a Silicon Valley startup in '82, did more work here on contract in the 80s, and ended up moving permanently to the Bay Area in '87 when the Boston tech industry started crashing. Plus, I'm black, so I have a weird perspective.
There never was one "tech" culture in either Silicon Valley, or Boston for that matter. There were many intersecting cultures that happened to be a function of whether you worked for big defense or business corporations, or for the smaller upstarts and startups, permanent or contract, gender, race and/or nationality. For those who don't know, Boston had a lot of women, Asians, and other minorities working in tech from the beginning. SV was essentially all white/male until the 90s (and now isn't a lot better except for far more Asians). Since I always preferred to work as a hands-on coder for smaller companies until I'd had enough by '05, the standard uniform was pretty much always T-shirt and jeans. Only wannabe managers and/or HYP grads would ever dress in any of the styles pictured above.
John also came along too late to have experienced some of the fun earlier Boston/SV Religious Experiences, including Dianetics, Randism, Neuro Linguistic Programming, EST, one or more of which infected most of my coding friends at various points in time. And, we mustn't forget the founding religion of Silicon Valley, eugenics.
Anyway, here's a Tom West related story. I met this guy Dave at WPI, we were both in the class of '76 and he'd been in my circle of friends from the beginning of freshman year. Dave was one of those genius engineers, got his EE degree in '75 and started working at DG that summer. He did some peripheral device interfaces, then he ended up on a "legacy" team of three that was to design the last product in the Nova product line, the Nova 4. This was also the just time the much larger Fountain Head Project got started.
The lead was a "veteran" ASIC/hardware designer (who was still under 30 IIRC) who'd just finished up being on the MicroNova chip design team, they also had a microcode guy. They used four of the then new 4 bit CPU slices from National Semi, along with designs for custom ASICs, and had a prototype CPU in a few months that was several times faster than the fastest Nova and could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost. Once that was more or less ready to go they tweaked the design, added the missing instructions, and ended up with an Eclipse that was also faster/cheaper than any to that point. Then they proposed prototyping a 32 bit board and implementing the intended FHP instruction set, which finally stepped on the wrong toes.
End result, the Nova 4 and Eclipse S/140 announced were running at 50% design clock speed to avoid cannibalizing sales of the remaining Nova/Eclipse models. They were also told that FHP did not need their help. Just before the Nova 4 was announced in '78, the three of them quit and started the Boston area office for MOS Technology (the 6502 folks). There were lots of orders for the newer cheaper Nova and Eclipse models and last minute changes needed, but all of the engineers had just quit. So, production was delayed by months, resulting in many lawsuits and loss of sales. And, that is how they almost killed DG before the launch of the MV/8000 documented in Soul of a New Machine..
They ended up doing several toy application specific microcontrollers that went into blinking/beeping/musical Hasbro toys of the era. Dave got bored with that, went to law school in Berkeley, and became an associate patent attorney at Cooley Godward. Around 2016 he went full MAGA, we ended our friendship, and last I knew he had his own law firm in Texas.
Some day I'll tell the story of how a backup team of 10 with weirdly diverse backgrounds managed to produce a working digital typesetter layout system on Sun 2 workstations in six months, just in time for the once in 5 year World Printing Convention, then most of us got fired (or contract terminated) for our efforts. Whereas, the big printer companies flagship development team of 20 guys failed to produce anything despite having worked on it for 4 years, and ended up taking over our code.
Marc, thanks for this great comment.
I'm largely but not entirely in agreement with you that "there never was one 'tech' culture in either Silicon Valley or Boston." The overlappingness of various tech subcultures is one of the things I was trying to get at. But is there in fact one overall 'culture' of which these subcultures are a part? I guess that depends on how one defines 'culture'. (My B.A. is in cultural anthropology, and I once spent lots and lots of time studying & thinking about questions like this. But these days I'm happy to just leave the question open.)
It's funny that I 'came along too late,' when I started working in tech at the a decade or more before many readers of this post were born! But as to your points about Dianetics, NLP, EST, etc, I think you may enjoy my essay on Varieties of Silicon Valley Religious experiences, which mentions all of these things. I plan to publish it to my substack later today.
And finally, your tale of VLSI design & corporate intrigue is the kind of story that is, to a certain kind of person — a person like me, that is — endlessly fascinating. I wrote a whole novel that starts with a similar king of thing on page one. I never heard, or have long since forgotten, that story about the micronova, etc. But one of my first technical writing assignments at Data General, after I had been there a few months, was to overhaul the microNova assembly language programming manual.
Data General had, in those days, an entire money-making division in Southboro that offered instruction to its customers. I attended their 2-week course in Nova assembly language programming, and it was one of the most educationally beneficial two weeks of my life. Before I took that class I basically had no idea how a computer really worked. But by the end of two weeks I had written a program, in assembler, such that on a naked machine -- one with no operating system running -- if you typed an 'A' on the keyboard, an "A" appeared on the screen. And if you can do that, you pretty much know what a computer is. Everything else is just details.