The Soul of ‘The Soul a New Machine’

I never met Tom West, who died a few days ago, but he had a big influence on me, through his work at Data General. DG was bought by another Massachusetts company, EMC, in 1999, and what made DG worth buying was CLARiiON, a mid-range storage system that I know quite well. The development of the CLARiiON was led by Tom West, and it marked the second time he postponed scrappy DG’s inevitable extinction. West’s first great success was the MV-series of 32-bit minicomputers, as detailed in the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder.

West didn’t smoke cigarettes while he was at work. Away from Westborough, between sunset and bed, he might smoke a pack or more. Once he muttered that smoking wasn’t harmful if you didn’t do it at work. Of course, West knew it was silly in any literal sense, and he uttered it barely loud enough to be heard. Some nights he would go away from Eagle [the project name for the MV] and play music, with friends and acquaintances, sometimes all night long, and then, fingers raw from his guitar strings, he would drive right in to work and become once again the tough, grim-looking manager. One evening that winter I said to him that I didn’t think it was really possible to be a businessman and a dropout all at once. West said, “But I do it.”

I worked with DG MV’s and Digital Equipment Corporation’s MicroVAX computers throughout the 1980’s. Then, during the dot.com boom of the 90’s, the unthinkable happened — DEC failed, despite having a new, cutting-edge 64-bit system called Alpha that put Data General’s AViiON servers to shame. Prime and Wang were the first Massachusetts minicomputer companies to fall, and the assumption was they’d be followed by DG. The idea that mighty DEC would disappear all together, let alone be survived by its much smaller competitor DG, was ludicrous, and yet it happened. What kept DG going was the CLARiiON. Even though DG was itself later acquired, the CLARiiON brand named lived on. It’s only now being retired, and to this day when you do a SCSI inquiry on a CLARiiON logical drive it returns “DGC,” for Data General Corporation.