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c595f8d
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When others write about people who live on the edge, who challenge their comfortable lives--and it has happened to me--they usually do it in a way that allows a reader a way out. You could render generosity into pathology, commitment into obsession. That's all in the repertory of someone who wants to put the reader at ease rather than conveying the truth in a compelling manner.
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Tracy Kidder |
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4f7e76e
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A YOUNG COMPUTER ENGINEER, known to be one of the most skillful in Westborough's basement, said he had a fantasy about a better job than his. In it, he goes to work as a janitor for a computer company whose designs leave much to be desired. There, at night, disguised by mop and broom, he sneaks into the offices of the company's engineers and corrects the designs on their blackboards and desks.
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Tracy Kidder |
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d290bd0
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The little room was a forest of equipment now. A couple of months had passed since Eagle had been cloned. Rasala had named the two new prototypes Tartis and Gallifrey, after the home planet and time machine of Dr. Who, the protagonist of a science fiction show on public TV. The two new machines were the first to run with the normal, full-speed 220-nanosecond clock. Like Dr. Who, Rasala explained, the purpose of these new prototypes was "to ..
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Tracy Kidder |
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2217a4c
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Adopting a remote, managerial point of view, you could say that the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team inside a company an entrepreneurial spirit, which was channeled in the right direction by constraints sent down from the top. But it seems more accurate to say that a group of engineers got excited about building a computer. Whether it arose by c..
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Tracy Kidder |
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7a62055
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How does one person with great talents come to exert a force on the world? I think in Farmer's case the answer lies somewhere in the apparent craziness, the sheer impracticality, of half of everything he does, including the hike to Casse.
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Tracy Kidder |
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759cf40
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Because if you're going to make a small inexpensive computer you have to sell a lot of them to make a lot of money. And we intend to make a lot of money.
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Tracy Kidder |
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a4961cd
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Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC's corporate organization. He felt that VAX was too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system by which various parts of the machine communicated with each other; for his taste, there was too much protocol involved. He decided that VAX embodied flaws in DEC's corporate organization. The machine expressed that phenomenally successful company's cautious, bureaucratic s..
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Tracy Kidder |
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03f70e0
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Between Holberger and Veres there exists a kind of technical understanding that outruns the powers of speech. Most Hardy Boys share this specialist's ESP to some degree. It's a feeling that some good chess players say they share with worthy opponents, a kind of mind reading--what Holberger calls being "in sync."
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Tracy Kidder |
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7c8e560
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When the veterans in the group were growing up, computers were quite rare and expensive, but Veres went to school in the age when anyone with a little money and skill could make up a small personal system. Veres says that what he does at home is different enough from what he does at work to serve as recreation for him. At work he deals with hardware; when he's at home, he focuses on software--reading programming manuals and creating new sof..
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Tracy Kidder |
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ef3ac21
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Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC's corporate organization. He felt that VAX was too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system by which various parts of the machine communicated with each other; for his taste, there was too much protocol involved. He decided that VAX embodied flaws in DEC's corporate organization.
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Tracy Kidder |
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f27877b
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a professor of computer science at MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum writes of a malady he calls "the compulsion to program." He describes the afflicted as "bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken, glowing eyes," who play out "megalomaniacal fantasies of omnipotence" at computer consoles; they sit at their machines, he writes, "their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and k..
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Tracy Kidder |
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6c51f5c
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It was an IBM machine, archaic now but gaudy then. The university owned it, in effect, and it lay inside a room that none but the machine's professional caretakers could enter during the day. But Alsing found out that a student could just walk into that room at night and play with the computer. Alsing didn't drink much and he never took any other drugs. "I was a midnight programmer," he confessed."
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Tracy Kidder |
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95e1ce5
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About ten other young, male undergraduates regularly attended these sessions of midnight programming. "It was a whole subculture. It's been popularized now, but it was a secret cult in my days," said Alsing. "The game of programming--and it is a game--was so fascinating. We'd stay up all night and experience it. It really is like a drug, I think." A few of his fellow midnight programmers began to ignore their girlfriends and eventually lost..
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Tracy Kidder |
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2118ca9
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The mind that relies on cliche does not really know what it is saying.
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Tracy Kidder |
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8a2f080
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Change the world? Of course they could. He really believed this, and he really believed that "a small group of committed individuals" could do it. He liked to say of PIH, "People think we're unrealistic. They don't know we're crazy."
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Tracy Kidder |
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5e5133a
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Engineers want to produce something," said Wallach. "I didn't go to school for six years just to get a paycheck. I thought that if this is what engineering's all about, the hell with it." He went to night school, to get a master's in business administration. "I was always looking for the buck. I'd get the M.B.A., go back to New York, and make some money," he figured. But he didn't really want to do that. He wanted to build computers."
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Tracy Kidder |
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b9161f6
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Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing.
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Tracy Kidder |
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b8f0809
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Among engineers generally, the most common form of ambition--the one made most socially acceptable--has been the desire to become a manager. If you don't become one by a certain age, then in the eyes of many of your peers you become a failure. Among computer engineers, I think, the wish to manage must be a virtual instinct.
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Tracy Kidder |
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cf9c31f
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Virchow would write, 'My politics were those of prophylaxis, my opponents preferred those of palliation.' He had a knack for aphorism. 'Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale.' 'It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation.' 'Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way to make a living, but to ensure the health of the ..
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Tracy Kidder |
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8d2b8bd
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The central belief of liberation theology - to provide a preferential option for the poor...providing medicine in the places that needed it the most...
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Tracy Kidder |
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fcc4bb2
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the Christianity of the peasants Farmer talked to had a different flavor: "the shared conviction that the rest of the world was wrong for screwing them over, and that someone, someone just and perhaps even omniscient, was keeping score."
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Tracy Kidder |
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0e7ed51
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central imperative of liberation theology--to provide a preferential option for the poor--seemed like a worthy life's goal to him. Of course, one could pursue it almost anywhere, but clearly the doctrine implied making choices among degrees of poverty. It would make sense to provide medicine in the places that needed it most, and there was no place needier than Haiti, at least in the Western Hemisphere, and he hadn't seen any place in Haiti..
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Tracy Kidder |