Twenty years ago, Tracy Kidder published the original nerd epic. The Soul of a New Machine made circuit boards seem cool and established a revolutionary notion: that there's art in the quest for the next big thing.

Nestled into a wicker rocking chair, among his framed maritime charts and teetering piles of sailing books, Tom West could easily pass for a salty old sea captain. In fact, rocking back and forth on his porch in the foggy coastal town of Westport, Massachusetts, wearing a worn-out T-shirt and sandals, he'd prefer it that way.

"Nobody in this town knows who I am," he says. "I don't talk about what I did. They don't ask." He leans back slowly, lightly gripping the chair's armrests with weathered hands. "It offends me when people think they know me because of the book."

The book, to West and others who lived its story, is Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine. The 1981 best-seller and Pulitzer Prize winner chronicles the dramatic efforts of West and his team of engineers at Massachusetts-based Data General to build a minicomputer known to its creators as "the Eagle."

In the 20 years since Soul made West a minor high tech celebrity for his gruff, competitive management style and brooding technical vision, PCs and workstations have supplanted minicomputers. After a long struggle in one hardware market or another, Data General too disappeared, swallowed up last year by storage giant EMC. Almost all of the Eagle project's engineers and managers abandoned the sinking company in the early '80s, scattering to the four corners of the high tech world and beyond. West stayed at Data General, finally retiring two years ago to the anonymity of his Westport home, his four boats, and the wireless server he designed and built in his basement.

To someone who knows West only from the book, he does at first glance defy its characterizations. For one thing, he's no longer the thin, bushy-haired figure Kidder describes. At 60, he sports a hearty gray beard and a healthy captain's belly. He's also lost his aversion to engineers who work on computers at home - he spends much of his time these days on the Internet. More striking is his demeanor, which, in stark contrast to the book's portrayal, borders on jovial. Today, West talks easily about what it's been like to have such a public record of one part of his life. "It was an odd experience, that's for sure," he muses. "I think I remember the story more than the event. Most events happen and I file them away. This one happened over and over again."

More than a simple catalog of events or stale corporate history, Soul lays bare the life of the modern engineer - the egghead toiling and tinkering in the basement, forsaking a social life for a technical one. It's a glimpse into the mysterious motivations, the quiet revelations, and the spectacular devotions of engineers - and, in particular, of West. Here is the project's enigmatic, icy leader, the man whom one engineer calls the "prince of darkness," but who quietly and deliberately protects his team and his machine. Here is the raw conflict of a corporate environment, factions clawing for resources as West shields his crew from the political wars of attrition fought over every circuit board and mode bit. Here are the power plays, the passion, and the burnout - the inside tale of how it all unfolded.

Over two decades, Soul has endured as the high tech story by which all others are judged. "It was the first book to describe the inner workings of the technology groups,"says Novell CEO Eric Schmidt, "and it did a good job of getting into the psychology of leadership. The corporate maneuvering was both fascinating and abhorrent to me."

Soul demanded that followers of technology thereafter see their subject with a new, astute eye. "I had never read such a book covering the work of engineers," says Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. "The readers got to 'live' with these engineers for a while. It's easy to consider engineers inhuman and hackers dangerous threats when you don't know them. I was very sad at the end, that the engineers were not better-respected and marketing folks here were credited with the computer." The engineer as artist, scientist, visionary; the computer builder as protagonist, even celebrity - these cultural figures came into being in Kidder's Soul and provided a new framework for understanding the progress of the industry.

Of course, the book was only a snapshot of the lives of its characters, most of whom are now, at mid-career, in their forties and fifties. The Eagle eventually shipped, and when it did, the people who toiled in the basement of Data General looked up and realized they needed something to fill the void. An engineer's essential desire, after all, is to design and build a machine and see it through to completion, but completion itself is therefore not the ultimate reward. In the Eagle days, West called this paradox "pinball." In pinball, he reasoned, the prize for winning is getting to play again. The story of the Eagle engineers since Soul is one of a career-length version of pinball.

West, too, kept playing. But for him, pinball meant more than building circuit boards. It was a grand contest requiring an intricate, and at times fierce, corporate strategy. There was more to a machine than designing it; there was confronting the business culture that often resisted innovation, and there was the pleasure of beating the other guy. West played this kind of game for 20 years after Eagle. He battled on until he was too burned out to fight for the next project, then he took his quarters and went home.

"Engineers are aesthetes," observes Tracy Kidder, looking back on the hero of Soul today. "They want technological symmetry. The smartest engineers at Data General wanted to build beautiful machines. West was different. He had another motive. He was pissed."

"The smartest engineers at Data General wanted to build beautiful machines. West had another motive. He was pissed."

Signing Up

West usually drove out of Westborough fast after work. "I can't talk about the machine," he said one evening, bent forward over the steering wheel. "I've gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I'm gonna go mad." - Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

Tom West never prepared himself for what became the Eagle project. Even today, when hindsight could make the chaotic effort seem like a well-planned scheme, he allows that the whole thing "just kind of happened." Then again, that's how the best engineering efforts often take shape. West had come to Data General in 1974 from RCA, where he'd essentially taught himself computer engineering after seven years of traveling the world building digital clocks for the Smithsonian Institution. Arriving as a line engineer, he quickly jockeyed his way to the head of DG's Eclipse group, which built one of the company's wildly successful 16-bit minicomputers. West was more than just technically adept; he had a knack for getting a computer out the door.

The drama recounted in Soul began in 1978, hatched out of a bitter power struggle. At the time, DG was a player in the multibillion-dollar minicomputer market, part of the late-'70s "Massachusetts miracle" of high tech development. But due in part to a feud over taxes between Data General founder Edson de Castro and Massachusetts' governor at the time, Michael Dukakis, de Castro transplanted DG's lead development team to Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Many of the company's top engineers, including West, refused to uproot their families and move.

Meanwhile, DG was desperate for a new machine. A year earlier, the company's arch rival, Digital Equipment Corporation, had released the powerful and quick-selling 32-bit VAX. DG's brass looked on in dismay as sales of VAX swamped those of their slower, 16-bit machines. DG needed a 32-bit computer, and fast. With the engineering department now split, the North Carolina team was chosen to develop an advanced 32-bit design that would be far more complex than VAX's. Dubbed the Fountainhead Project (FHP), after its former home in a Westborough, Massachusetts, apartment complex, the machine would be the company's chance to leapfrog Digital.

With de Castro ordaining the North Carolina group as the company's savior, West and other engineers who'd stayed behind felt slighted. "The implication was, those guys had the right stuff and we didn't," says Carl Alsing, West's soft-spoken deputy in the Eagle days. "We were being asked to just maintain the old tried-and-true designs and upgrade them every year or two. We felt a little affronted by that, and that's how it all got started."

So West made a brilliant Machiavellian move. Instead of designing a next-generation processor, his group would simply port the 16-bit minicomputer to 32-bit, keeping it reverse-compatible with the old software. He pitched it to de Castro as insurance; it would be there if something went wrong in North Carolina. In fact, he realized, a streamlined approach and its promise of reverse compatibility could be executed more quickly and prove more successful than a brand-new design. The soft sell worked - the project received tacit approval from de Castro. Code-named Eagle, the machine would be designed and built by West's group in the basement of Westborough building 14A/B. He promised, audaciously, that it could be completed in a year. "We're building," West told Kidder, "what I thought we could get away with."

West and Alsing corralled a group of managers and hired two dozen young engineers, most straight out of college - "smarter, non-mindfucked people," West says today. The new hires split into two groups: the "Hardy Boys," responsible for the Eagle's hardware, and the "Microkids," charged with writing the machine's microcode. From its tortured beginnings, the project was layered with the tangible intensity of twentysomething engineers racing against the clock to save the company. While West was "low-key" about the machine outside the Eagle group, he was the opposite within, telling the kids that the company was on the line, spurring them on with the belief that the Eagle - and they - were DG's last hope for survival.

"We sublimated everything to the project," recalls Jonathan Blau, a Microkid on Eagle. "You worked long hours, seven days a week. Your head was always in it, and it was fun. It had that boot camp quality that can't really be repeated." West had invented a term for this DG brand of sublimation, in which the machine became the engineers' lives. He called it "signing up."

To Kidder, the combination of the team's fervor, West's cunning and taste for vengeance, and the corporate mystery shrouding a computer came as a shock. At the time a freelance writer struggling to pay the bills, Kidder had been inspired to write about technology after the protests surrounding the opening of the Seabrook nuclear reactor in 1976. Over a beer, his editor at The Atlantic, Richard Todd, suggested he look into computers. Todd knew someone in the business: his old college roommate, Tom West.

Kidder took a sailing trip with West, and after hearing about Eagle, came to the basement of 14A/B to see the project firsthand. The day he showed up, he says, Alsing immediately shunted him off to the cafeteria. "There was this feeling of paranoia," remembers Kidder. "Then he started telling me these stories. I thought he was just talking about making molded plastic boxes - the most boring thing in the world. But they were so passionate about it."

The Eagle engineers' passion was nurtured inside - and perhaps in spite of - a company with a reputation for brash attitudes and a culture rife with dictatorial management and cutthroat competition. This spirit enveloped the competing Eagle and FHP, and in West, the battle revealed a true talent for a brand of fierce corporate gamesmanship. Kidder describes West's tirade about a department he believed was holding up the Eagle: "'I'm gonna detonate those guys,' said West in a flat, calm voice, as if he were planning a business trip. Then he promised to 'waste 'em.' He added, 'We'll string them up by their toes.'"

Such viciousness toward outside threats may have been understandable. More mysterious was his aloof management style within his own team. To the younger engineers, he came off as cold, uncaring; Soul relates how he would ignore greetings from Hardy Boys and Microkids when he passed them in the hall. "I would never try to defend that I knew what I was doing," West says now, looking back. He was "shy," he suggests, or maybe "just embarrassed." "It really was a thinking game," he finally says, "and somebody had to keep a clear head about what the overall goal was. To do that requires a fair amount of insulation and isolation. Otherwise, you just get caught up in the chatter." But perhaps the most convincing explanation for West's brutal aloofness is postulated in Kidder's book: West was attempting to provide the team with a scapegoat, someone to blame for their cramped conditions and unrealistic schedules.

It was West's corporate agnosticism, Alsing says now, that drove the project and ultimately Alsing himself. "People expect their company to do the right thing, and usually they're disappointed," he says. "Tom expected the company to do the wrong thing, and he wasn't disappointed at all." West was protecting the team from his lack of faith, Alsing says, describing West's philosophy. "When your company doesn't do the right thing, you manipulate it until it does."

"Somebody's got to dig ditches. But it's a lot more fun to dig ditches where nobody else has dug one before."

"We used to complain to Tom about working conditions," laughs Ken Holberger, a manager of the Hardy Boys. "One time it just got really hot, the ventilation was terrible, and the offices were too crowded. He'd look at us and say, 'Well, look how good you're doing! Tell me what I'm doing wrong!' Which was certainly a cynical thing to say, but it was funny at the time."

West's strategy, if cynical, was effective, and the team somehow brought the machine to life. The FHP had fallen hopelessly behind schedule, and the Eagle - although it took longer to complete than the year West had promised - became more than "insurance." It was Data General's only hope to rescue itself from permanent 16-bit obsolescence. "Tom West took it upon himself and Steve Wallach [Eagle's designer], as a personal thing, to prove that they could outdo those guys in North Carolina," says Ed Zander, director of marketing for Eagle and FHP at the time and now president of Sun Microsystems. "It got very nasty. At the end of the day, when it came out, the Eagle saved Data General - but Data General was never really saved. With three years of lost market share to DEC, it never really recovered."

The machine, officially named the Eclipse MV/8000, was announced to the public in April 1980, in an afternoon ceremony in New York City. A few members of the team got to go and bask in their roles as company saviors, but the feeling was short-lived. Because West had shielded them from the politics of DG - something many wouldn't discover until reading Soul - the Eagle team was unprepared for the backlash the project created. They believed they had rescued DG, says Microkid Blau, but "unfortunately the rest of the company didn't feel that way, so there was a lot of animosity." The FHP team, for one, felt betrayed when its machine was canceled. And a team that worked in secret - with a crafty leader who bucked the system - could be highly effective, but it also could be dangerous to the powers that be. A new vice president of engineering had taken over at DG, replacing the pro-Eagle Carl Carman. The new VP was openly hostile to a group he believed had purposefully defied the interests of the company - "neglecting to point out," Wallach says now, "that without Eagle there would not have been a Data General." The Eagle group was broken up and scattered to various projects, and West was shipped off to Data General's Japan office before a single MV/8000 was sold.

By the time Soul was published a little more than a year later, greeted with a glowing review in The New York Times, many in the Eagle group had already left Data General or were about to leave. Some wanted to start their own ventures. Some were burned out. Others were young and simply ready to move on to the next thing. Dissatisfied with the lack of recognition and opportunities at a company that their herculean effort helped save, and frustrated by the politics of conflict that pervaded DG, they saw little reason to stay.

Holberger still describes the Eagle drama in terms of an old Western, as he did to Kidder 20 years ago. "I felt like the team members were gunfighters who were brought into town to solve some problem," he says. "They shot the place up, and they solved the problem. And then the town had to figure out what to do with them afterward. Which was mostly to get rid of them."

Perpetual Motion

Holberger has noticed that there is almost no one in the basement involved in CPU design who is over 35. What happens to old CPU engineers? Holberger is 26 now, and though not exactly on his deathbed, he is curious about what a computer engineer does "afterward."

When Data General ran the Eagle gunslingers out of town, most of them took different routes to a similar destination: the next project. Having successfully created a machine - seen it through from bare wires and circuits to working computer - they were ready to sign up and do it again. Even after the burnout and the lack of recognition at DG, they left seeking projects as intense, if not more intense, than Eagle. They often found them. And for all the gruffness of West's management style, none of the Eagle vets look back on the project with anything but fond memories.

Ken Holberger and Chuck Holland, a Microkids manager, left DG in the early '80s and traveled similar career paths. After bouncing around at other hardware companies for a few years, the two founded Epoch Systems, where they designed combination optical and magnetic disc storage. "Ken and I struck out into the deep West," says Holland, describing the pioneer spirit of their early startup efforts. When they sold the company for a pile of cash in 1992 - ironically to EMC, which later acquired DG - neither needed to work again. Both do.

On his third startup after Epoch, Holberger, at 46, has the luxury of picking and choosing his projects, the most recent being to serve as director of marketing at Vox2, which is working on a product that ties cell phones into a home telephone network. Holland, now 48, is back working full time for LiveVault, a network backup company he and Holberger founded seven years ago. "I've always been driven to create," he says. "And engineers want to create something and see it come to the end - the end is everything. Then, if you ever get there, you wonder what's next."

"Engineers want to create something and see it come to the end - the end is everything. Then, if you ever get there, you wonder what's next."

Few Eagle alumni have attained what is generally viewed as an engineer's corporate grail: a high-level management role at a large tech company. They have stayed close to the spark of technology, the thrill of projects, the intensity of creation.

"I had high hopes for a management career," says Carl Alsing, now 57. "The hope was that I could leverage my experience and judgment. That was disappointing, because at the lower levels of management where I ended up, whatever companies said they wanted me to do, they really wanted me to put out fires in the current product and delay any kind of innovation."

Alsing figures more prominently in Soul than any Eagle architect besides West. Although in many ways West's inverse - tall and lanky, with a quiet, hands-on manner around the younger engineers - Alsing may have known the Eagle leader better than anyone else. When West first took over the Eclipse group, Alsing, as he says in Soul, went to work for him "largely because he felt that it would be safer to stand on West's side than not."

"You see somebody like that and you say, 'I think I'll stay around and watch this and see what happens,'" he says now. "'Could this be right? Is this how the world is?'"

So when West left for Japan, Alsing didn't stick around. In late 1980, he moved to Silicon Valley to work at Tandem, an early entrant in the fault-tolerant computer business. Four years later, he jumped to a small startup and began developing optical character recognition technology. Since the mid-'80s, he has bounced around small companies in the OCR industry, mostly by choice and occasionally by downsizing. Despite an aversion to large companies, especially in an age in which he says corporate loyalty to employees is nil, he did a one-year stint at Xerox PARC beginning in 1995. Since then, he's worked as an independent contractor. "I admit what I'm doing now is more for the satisfaction of designing things myself," he says. "So maybe I can only do one man's work in a year, and I can't get 20 people to do some cool thing. But it's fun."

For Alsing, recently signed on with MagnaWare, an OCR startup in Santa Cruz, California, the core desire is still to innovate, regardless of whether he's running things. "Somebody's got to dig ditches," he says. "But it's a lot more fun to dig ditches where nobody else has dug one before." His challenge has been to stay mobile enough to keep up with the pace of change. "You stay in a place too long, you miss out on new technology and new tools and new ways of doing things," he says. "I've seen friends who stayed too many years in something, and they always find a niche where they become a guru of something and manager of whatnot. And then when that activity ends and they leave the company or get laid off, they have no skills. In 10 years, you really are obsolete. The tools are gone, the vocabulary is different."

This idea of perpetual movement in the face of looming obsolescence is a constant theme among the Eagle vets. Like Alsing, most of them had already glided into the next tech market by the time the minicomputer sector crashed in the mid-'80s. Some struck it rich with their own tech ventures, while others either never made the right play or elected to avoid the risks that startups pose. A few have stayed put at one company for 15 years or more. But all of them have been forced to adapt as Moore's law and the Internet redefined and rebuilt the industry time after time. "The technology keeps changing," says Ken Holberger, "and the people keep changing - to track it, to chase it, or to push it, depending on where you are on the curve."

Jonathan Blau is the only member of the team who left the high tech world, disillusioned by his post-DG jobs. He worked for a decade alongside a half-dozen other Eagle vets at a company called Alliant, based in Massachusetts and started by FHP alumni, and eventually found that he "did not perform well under the pressure. It was not as much fun; a terrible contrast to my years at Data General. DG did have that kind of rough edge to it, but we were told we were the heroes, we were going to save the company." Blau, a Microkid and Hardy Boy whose voice still crackles with excitement when he talks about solving the Eagle "puzzle," is now a junk bond analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in New York City. After burning out at Alliant, he came back to his hometown and did some software development for an investment bank, gradually transitioning into an analyst role. Now 44 and content to study rather than build technology, he still sees parallels between the past and present.

"We'll hire kids out of school," he says, "and I'll see what they're going through, and think back to those times. It was such an intense experience, where we went through so many cycles of ups and downs throughout the creation of the thing."

"We used to say for every year of experience at Data General, it's worth two years at any other place," adds Steve Wallach. "And you'll age four."

Brooklyn-born, and in his mid-thirties at the time he became a manager on Eagle, Wallach was the technical mastermind behind the computer's processor. Kidder describes his eureka moment - how he constructed the processor's addressing scheme - in a chapter entitled "Wallach's Golden Moment." Portrayed as cheerful but volatile, the Wallach of Soul is a man with a photographic memory who wears cowboy boots and has a tendency to kick the hell out of his office wall when frustrated.

Wallach seems no more mellow at 55. But his cowboy boots, if not his Brooklyn accent, are more at home in the offices of Texas-based Chiaro Networks, where he is vice president of engineering. Outspoken and blunt, he has a roster of funny anecdotes about Soul, each of which he punctuates with a verbal wink like "if you follow what I'm saying" or "Do you get my meaning?" His epitaph, he says, should simply read, "Here lies a computer engineer."

"Data General did have that kind of rough edge to it, but we were told we were the heroes, we were going to save the company."

Wallach left DG in 1980, spending time in California before cofounding a next-generation "mini supercomputer" company called Convex in Dallas. He tried to get West to join, but while West liked the idea, he couldn't muster the enthusiasm. "He was just burnt," says Wallach. The company, successful for a few years, hit the wall quickly when the market was soaked up by workstations in the early '90s, and Convex was eventually bought up by HP in 1995. But by then, Wallach's reputation as a gifted hardware mind was already sealed. He went into what he calls semi-retirement (working only 40-hour weeks), dabbling in venture capital, consulting for the government's ASCI supercomputer projects, and serving on the Clinton administration's IT Advisory Committee.

Last year, when a friend from the venture world told him about Chiaro, a startup developing next-generation optical switches, he jumped at the chance to play a little pinball. But just as with Eagle, Wallach - who still rolls up his sleeves and does coding at Chiaro - isn't looking for accolades. "My motivation on Eagle had nothing to do with recognition," he says. "I wanted to prove that I could get something out the door. And I was right and the other guys were wrong. I'm not interested in notoriety or bullshit."

He remembers getting a call a few years ago from a headhunter who was seeking a CTO for a "fast-growing Massachusetts company." "I asked him which one," recalls Wallach. "He says, 'We can't tell you.' I said, 'If you don't tell me the name of the company I'm hanging up.' He says, 'OK, the company is Data General. The job is to replace Tom West.' So I'm laughing for about a minute or two. He says, 'What's so funny?' He knew I worked at Data General and nothing else. And I said, 'Go read The Soul of a New Machine and you'll understand.' That's how I knew Tom West was retiring."

Playing Pinball

"[DG vice president Carl] Carman says the company's in a lot of trouble if it's not there by April. Suppose I quit? I could just say, 'Fuck it,' and go ... I'm not gonna do the next machine. I'm gonna give somebody else a chance to fail. I'm gonna get totally out of computers."

West stopped once in this long, unusually bitter monologue to say: "No, we wouldn't have a disaster. We'd back and fill." He seemed to be saying that he had to make himself believe that dire consequences would ensue if his team missed its deadline.

Of all the Eagle team, Tom West seemed the most unlikely candidate to be a Data General lifer. Soul characterizes him as a wanderer, a former guitar player and folksinger who might rather drift from town to town than see another computer through the DG gauntlet. Although a master of corporate strategy, West seemed in some ways larger than Data General, too worldly for its confines. "He's not a company guy," says Alsing today. "Well, he wasn't a company guy." Kidder even writes in Soul, reflecting on West's time at DG: "Ever since he had gone to work for Data General, West had been talking about quitting. Someday he'd wander off." He never did.

In 1980, with the Eagle project barely completed, DG's upper management offered him a series of what he calls "unpalatable options"; Japan seemed the most promising. While Kidder hints in the book that the transfer was just what West needed, West today says he was "effectively fired."

"He got the shaft," concludes Wallach matter-of-factly. But, says West, "I thought, 'Well, this will keep me alive for the moment.'"

Even two decades later, he laments that because of his departure he wasn't able to protect the Eagle kids, to prepare them for the bitter end of the project they'd thrown their lives into. "Their legacy was the book," says West.

The MV/8000 itself managed to keep DG afloat in the minicomputer business, selling briskly for several years. West returned from Japan after a year to find the machine a success. Yet without the book, he doubts the Eagle achievements would ever have been recognized. "The people who shot the revolutionaries realized that there was an imprint," he says, "and that they couldn't rewrite history." History intact, he returned to the job of technical manager and was quickly promoted to vice president and eventually senior vice president of engineering - "senior VP in charge of not much," he calls it. "They decided they didn't want me around people, so I would just come up with ideas," laughs the man who blustered in Soul about "detonating" fellow employees and stringing them up by their toes.

By 1983, Data General was floundering again and the computer landscape was changing radically. Just as minicomputers had captured the market from mainframes by being smaller and easier to use, PCs and workstations were crashing the minicomputer party. In Japan, West had designed the DGOne, the first full-screen laptop, in an attempt to push the company into the growing PC market. But saddled with proprietary software and a slow processor, the project was ultimately canceled. No longer the brash upstart of its heyday, DG failed to adjust its course to the prevailing market winds.

Every DG veteran, from Tom West to Ed Zander to Joel Schwartz, current head of the Data General division at EMC, recites a litany of disruptive technologies that DG developed but failed to exploit as a way of explaining why the company never became a powerhouse. There was FHP's ahead-of-its-time network-computing architecture. There was a laser printer developed in the late '70s. There was the DGOne. There was a thin Web server developed by Tom West in the mid-'90s. The list goes on.

West blames DG's management, and its inability to recognize or reward the company's engineering talent, for the failures. "They like to talk in terms of missing the different waves of technology," says West, "but a well-managed company doesn't do that. It was a very top-down, autocratic, turn-of-the-century mill-owner kind of management mentality. It could only grow to a certain size, because nobody trusted anybody."

By the late '90s, Data General seemed a company that had been granted immortality but had neglected to ask for perpetual youth. Revenue stagnated at $1 billion for over a decade, while profits sank and the stock plummeted from a high of 81 in 1983 to single digits by 1990, before edging back up to 10, where it hovered until 1999, when the company was bought by EMC. DG had held on, though, while the high-flying minicomputer outfits of the 1970s, with names like Wang Laboratories and Prime Computer, shuttered or sold out to outfits closer to the leading edge. Compaq, underscoring the PC's decimation of minicomputers, snapped up Digital in 1998.

All the while, West endured at DG, although he often felt more like a showpiece than an innovator. "There was still the notion that I was sort of a necessary evil," he says. "They needed me to sign books and go on sales calls. They were much happier with me as a figurehead than as an action figure." The Soul of a New Machine and the Eagle had made him something of a tech icon. "Whenever we announced something, Tom was always involved," says Joel Schwartz. "He added credibility. We were always able to get a greater attendance from analysts when we rolled out Tom."

West continued to fight for new ideas, and DG even mustered a mid- '90s turnaround of sorts by trimming costs, laying off thousands, and shifting focus to the successful Clariion data storage products that West conceived. He then set to work on saving DG again, turning to the Internet in a last-ditch effort to develop a technology that would vault the company into the next high tech era. The answer, according to West, was a thin client server, the kind of thing small businesses could use to get connected. It was an idea ahead of its time, and again DG failed to capitalize. After an initial market run garnered less than spectacular sales, the project was scaled back. Today, servers like West's are a huge and growing business.

West struggles to explain why he stuck around to watch the sunset of DG, rather than hitch his fortunes to one of the countless startups or industry leaders that tried to lure him away. "I'd much rather be a big fish in a little pond," he offers at one point, "than someone like Gordon Bell, who went to Microsoft and disappeared." Another time, he says, "You could do new products and companies within the company, rather than shag some venture capitalist and kill yourself for five years." To be an entrepreneur, he says, "you have to be interested in networking, even with fools."

Still, most of the Eagle team wonders what kept him at Data General. Steve Wallach is sure that it was in West's genes - his father and grandfather both spent their whole careers at AT&T. Others suspect the Eagle project and its aftermath, in which West ended up divorced, may have drained his energy. At the end of Soul, Kidder describes West as losing weight and sleep over the Eagle. "He put a lot into it," says one Eagle engineer today, "and it took a toll on his personal life."

Others who worked on the Eagle insist that for West, staying put at DG wasn't what it might have been for a more ordinary guy; it wasn't the same as being stuck. "Just because Tom stayed at one company, that doesn't put him on the spectrum of the average engineer," argues Chuck Holland. "He did different projects and worked in different sections of the company. It wasn't a static career at all."

West, Alsing believes, somehow turned the tables on obsolescence. "I think he felt that he knew how to work with the company, he knew how to get them to do what he wanted. So I don't think he ever felt frustrated, ever just said, 'I can't get anything accomplished here. I have to go somewhere else.'"

Alsing's rosy assessment, however, didn't hold for the duration of West's tenure. West eventually discovered that he was, in practice, no longer an engineer. DG had become just another job. "I did usually prevail," he says. "But I began to think, 'It's too hard. This isn't a technology job at all. It's about moving around these roadblocks to try and do things that are pretty sensible. You're solving these same problems over and over again that are really people problems. They have nothing to do with electrons.'"

By the time he retired, West found that Data General wasn't even listening to his advice on Internet strategies. "I thought that was kind of silly," he says, laughing. "Because I'd spent all my time and energy trying to figure out how this Internet thing could be used by an old minicomputer company, and they just didn't ..." He trails off, then says softly, "didn't care."

The Zen of Soul

Many looked for words to describe their true reward. They used such phrases as "self-fulfillment," "a feeling of accomplishment," "self-satisfaction." [Hardy Boy] Jim Guyer struggled with those terms awhile with growing impatience. Then he said, "Look, I don't have to get official recognition for anything I do. Ninety-eight percent of the thrill comes from knowing that the thing you designed works, and works almost the way you expected it would. If that happens, part of you is in that machine."

West doesn't play much music these days - arthritis in his hands hampers his guitar playing. But happily remarried and living in Westport, he's plenty busy sailing, fishing for striper, and keeping tabs on the industry via the Web. He seems mostly content to be done with the high tech game, and proclaims no desire to return to it. Life is full. "I've seen a lot of burnout," he says, "but the sadder thing I've seen is a lot of people who reach 65 and find that there's nothing in the world they like to do. That's really sad, because they've worked their whole lives, and then the whole meaning of things goes away."

He also sounds the Moore's law theme. "High tech careers today," he points out, "require a great deal of planning. You can be building optical switches today and be on top of the market. But at some point, optical switches are going to be like modems - a dime a dozen - and then you're going to have to do something else. So you should realize that it might be more healthy to be involved in different things."

West cultivated his own eclectic interests over the years and has remained friends with Kidder. He grumbles that he's been trying for months to get him down to Westport for a sailing trip. Kidder, at 54, is at work on his fifth book since Soul, this one based on his July story in The New Yorker story about a Harvard-educated doctor working in Haiti. Other than keeping up with his friend West, he says he "almost made a fetish out of not following the computer industry." But he marvels at the pace of change since his days in the basement of building 14A/B. "If you had told me in 1981 that Digital and Data General wouldn't exist today," he says, "I would have said you were out of your mind."

Kidder sold the movie rights for Soul to Columbia Pictures in 1982, and the studio sent Kurt Luedtke, winner of a best screenplay Oscar for Out of Africa, to DG to research the script. "One day he flew in to town and interviewed us all, while consuming vast quantities of scotch," recalls Chuck Holland. "He kept asking if anything exciting happened. 'Well, yeah,' we said, 'remember when a board burned up?' It's so silly that none of us thought to make up something juicy. Needless to say, there was no movie."

Even without an accompanying Hollywood blockbuster, the book has seen remarkable success. Translated into a dozen languages, today it's required reading in top business schools and universities as a case study in everything from effective project management to the exploited capitalist worker. Over the years, as minicomputers landed on the scrap heap and Data General faded, Soul continued to fascinate readers who found some kernel of truth in what Kidder captures about the intensity of the working world, something that transcends high tech.

"It's got a Zen characteristic," says West. "It's not a cookbook for building computers. It's not a cookbook for good management strategies. Why did this book strike a chord with such discordant people? I'm not sure I know. Tracy can't tell you. It has something to do with work, and dreams, and why people do it."

Every Eagle veteran recalls encountering readers, from washing-machine repairmen to teachers, who could relate to the book - and countless engineers who were inspired by it. Data General, meanwhile, never hesitated to wring every drop of publicity from Soul 's success, despite the fact that most Eagle alumni felt thoroughly unrewarded by DG. The company handed out copies of the book to scores of potential clients and recruits over the years, and even mentioned it in one of its annual reports.

Something in the use of Soul as a publicity tool, however, defies everything that went into the Eagle project. The engineers, after all, never sought a record of events, nor did they promote their connection to the book over the years. Although happy to be recognized, all of them pin the book's success squarely on Kidder's storytelling ability, not their own efforts to create a long-outdated computer. For them, the goal was to finish the machine so they could sign up again, and get on with their real business - technical creation.

Back in Westborough, West was often asked to autograph copies for clients and VIPs. It irritated him. "It was Tracy 's book," he laments. Signing Soul triggered a self-denial not unfamiliar to colleagues like Alsing and Wallach who have watched him lead. "I kept trying to point out to people that this is a book. Tracy won the Pulitzer Prize. I didn't win the Pulitzer Prize. And they didn't seem to always get it."

Joel Schwartz recounts a time when West flatly refused to sign books promised to a group of 30 visiting Korean clients and dignitaries. "Tom had a raggedy side," remembers Schwartz. "He was having one of those days, and he didn't want to sign them. I called him, I pleaded with him. But he wouldn't do it." Perhaps it was this same obstinate focus and proclivity for privacy that not only drove West to create the Eagle but also to stay at DG for the next 20 years. Schwartz continues: "So I said there's only one thing to do. I brought them over and signed them all myself: 'Best wishes, Tom West.'"

PLUS

Souls, Lost and Found