SAN FRANCISCO — Steven J. Wallach is completing the soul of his newest machine.

Thirty years ago, Mr. Wallach was one of a small team of computer designers profiled by Tracy Kidder in his Pulitzer Prize winning best seller, “The Soul of a New Machine.”

It was Mr. Wallach, then 33, who served as the architect and baby sitter for his “microkids,” the young team that designed the Data General MV 8000, the underdog minicomputer that kept the company alive in its brutal competition with the Digital Equipment Corporation.

At 63, he is still at it. He plans to introduce his new company, Convey Computer, and to describe the technical details of a new supercomputer intended for scientific and engineering applications at a supercomputing conference in Austin, Tex., this week.

Mr. Wallach thinks he has come upon a new idea in computer design in an era when it has become fashionable to say that there are no new ideas. So far, he has persuaded some of the leading thinkers in the high performance computing world that he might be right. Both Intel and a second chip maker, Xilinx, have joined as early investors.