Tracy Kidder, Author of 'The Soul of a New Machine,' Dies at 80

[highplainsdem]

Source: NYT

Tracy Kidder, a wide-ranging journalist and author whose deep reporting and novelistic prose illuminated worlds as diverse as home construction, disease prevention and — as portrayed in his prizewinning 1981 breakthrough book, “The Soul of a New Machine” — the computer industry, died on Tuesday in Boston. He was 80.

His daughter, Alice Kidder Bukhman, and his son, Nat Kidder, said he died of lung cancer at Dr. Kidder Bukhman’s home.

-snip-

For “Among Schoolchildren” (1989), he spent an entire school year in a Massachusetts classroom. For “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World” (2003), Mr. Kidder followed Dr. Farmer — the founder of Partners in Health, an organization that provides care to some of the world’s poorest people — to his hospital in Haiti as well as to Peru, Cuba, Russia and elsewhere.

His most lauded book, “The Soul of a New Machine,” introduced readers to the physical parts and electronic bits that go into creating a business computer. The book arrived just as the PC revolution was gearing up.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/books/tracy-kidder-dead.html

[SheltieLover]

1. ...

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

2. Required reading in an 80s college class

I think I saw a used copy at a thrift shop years ago.

Brings back memories

[lapfog_1]

7. along with a couple of others

Travels in ComputerLand
and
Mythical Man-Month

Soul of a New Machine was perhaps the best of the era.

edit to add that the HBO series "Halt and Catch Fire" was similar to Soul of a New Machine... but completely fictional. It did cover the same time frame and similar themes.

[reACTIONary]

8. Required reading in my Software Engineering class, and it was....

.... on the test. But instead of asking some technical or insightful thematic questions, in the spirit of the book, the Prof asked some relatively simple "story telling" questions. Like what was so-and-so's job title. If you had actually read the book it was very easy to answer. If you had not, you couldn't bullshit an answer.

It really pissed off all of the bullshiters. I was like, smirking.

One of the insightful lessons I learned from this book came from the passage where one of the General Data engineers reverse engineers a DEC chip. As he examines the circuitry, he imagines he can discern the organizational structure of Digital. Bloated. Bureaucratic. This stayed with me - it is often the case that the technical system structure is influence, or even determined, by the organizational structure of the engineering team. More so than us engineers would like to admit.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

11. I wonder how the book would read today..still relevant or dated

45 years is 10 life years for tech

[reACTIONary]

12. I was wondering that myself, a while back....

.... and I went through my bookshelves looking for it. It got lost along the way. Maybe l'll see if I can pick up a copy somewhere.

[William Seger]

3. I had just started a programming job on an HP minicomputer

... and everyone in the office was reading it. Great story!

[highplainsdem]

4. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/tracy-kidder-pulitzer-winning-author-who-turned-22099214.php

-snip-

Kidder hated the title “literary journalist,” telling the Dallas Morning News in 2010 that he found the description “pretentious.”

The term creative nonfiction irked him too: “It suggests we make things up.”

Instead, he saw himself as a storyteller.

“I don’t think of fiction and nonfiction as all that different, except that nonfiction is not invented," he told the AP. "But I take exception to those people who think nonfiction should not appropriate the techniques of fiction ... They belong to storytelling.”

[erronis]

5. Northampton is my new "Home Town". And it is wonderful.

RIP, wonderful story teller.

[highplainsdem]

6. From the Harvard Gazette, 2010:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11/a-master-at-his-craft/

His inspirations include poets like Emily Dickinson and writers like John McPhee and George Orwell. When he gets stuck, he frequently goes back to writing with a pen and paper. And he will often open to a random page of “Moby Dick” and read for a while, “Just to feel sort of free enough to write again.”

As for finding his subjects, Kidder said it’s not easy, but that he tries to find a person who is doing “something interesting, or who interests me.” It’s not ideas he finds compelling, but people.

Above all, he told his audience last month, “the cardinal rule for nonfiction writers is to make what you have … believable to your readers.”

You have to find a way to credibly tell your readers, said Kidder: “I know this sounds too good to be true, but it happened.”

[dalton99a]

9. Kick

Josh
Massachusetts · 2h ago
Here's an anecdote about the writing of Soul of the New Machine. I was one of the subjects of the book, I designed the ALU. I left DG and went to another computer company. After I left Tracy called me to have lunch. Data General had banned him from the building. The VP who had given him permission to follow the project had never mentioned it to the CEO. When that VP left his successor told the CEO in passing about Tracy. Ed DeCastro, the CEO went ballistic. DGs lawyers called Tracy and threatened to sue him. Little Brown, the publisher, politely informed DGs lawyers about the first amendment and they relented and let Tracy back in. After Soul of the New Machine came out and became a best seller, it topped the NY Times best seller list all summer beating out The Right Stuff, DG started using it in their recruiting.

Harry
New York · 2h ago
A fine writer, a paragon of the art of nonfiction, and a journalist of sterling reputation. What I and many other readers fear is that when the Tracy Kidders of the world go they will be replaced by the aggregators and the hot-takers and the ChatGPTers. What a shame it will be to lose the kind of engaging, informative, immersive, accurate, and entertaining long-form reportage practiced at the highest level by writers such as Tracy Kidder. May his work be read for a long time to come!

[Xipe Totec]

10. A touchstone. nt

[eppur_se_muova]

13. I heartily encourage DUers to read "Mountains Beyond Mountains", to see what can happen when people geniunely try to do

as much good in their lives as they can.

Dr. Farmer had an unconventional childhood. It may have been an important contributor to his character. Such things are risky, but sometime produce surprisingly mold-breaking results.

[jeffreyi]

14. We had those Data General machines in the 1980's.

Forest Service. Cutting edge stuff at the time. We had internal email a long time before anybody else did. I read the book.