Finished reading "Soul of a New Machine" last week. It's the story of the team that built the "Eagle" machine, a computer released in the 80s by a company called Data General. New grads working 12 hours a day undercover, with the constant risk that all their work might be thrown in the trash, just to have the privilege of working on the latest computer.
I also really liked how the author tried to explain low level concepts of how computers work so that the readers can sort of understand the complexity of what is going on and what the engineers were doing at the time.
The explanations are charming, simple but never inaccurate, which is impressive considering the author does not have a CS/EE background.
I really got the feeling the author was not simply telling us what he saw, but he was genuinely interested in understanding why every engineer at that company was willing to endure such terrible working conditions just to have a chance to work on that machine.
As an aside: the last chapters of the book have a few reflections by the author on some topics related to computers in general. One of these is the author's rebuttal to the (apparently popular at the time?) opinion that computers were going to cause massive unemployment and were going to kill any creativity left in jobs, relegating us all to be simple button pushers.
The rebuttal is not particularly interesting(something on how it's just going to change jobs and make new others, but not replace them all) but I found it funny because it reads incredibly similar to opinions on AI nowadays.
