The Soul of an Old Machine(skalski.dev)
76 pointsby mskalski6 days ago3 comments
  • jonhohlea day ago
    I’ve held onto FireWire for long and feel attached to it. I’ve used it for over 25 years.

    I think I feel the same way about TiVo and fear the day the guide stops updating or the motherboard fails (everything else in the box is replaceable).

    These things are ephemeral in the grand scheme of history, but when they are embedded in workflows and habits for decades I find it hard to let go.

  • dkdcdeva day ago
    I still need to read “The Soul of a New Machine”, should I save this until after?
    • JSR_FDEDa day ago
      Should be compulsory reading. Actually, now that I think about it, this would make a great interview question in the AI era: “what did you think of Soul of a new machine?”
      • abdulhaqa day ago
        I found Showstopper! even more compelling
        • ghaff21 hours ago
          Those two books are probably the two best about tech projects I've ever read. I worked at Data General as a product manager for about 13 years and know many of the individuals although I joined a few years after the book was written.
          • le-mark18 hours ago
            What strikes me is the stories that never get told. I met a retiree at a Java meetup once who had worked at Zilog during the z8000 era. He was surprised to meet someone who knew about that.
            • ghaff16 hours ago
              Especially, pre-web and pre-blogs there's a great deal of tech industry history that largely doesn't exist any longer unless it was especially notable and/or some author decided to spend a year or two writing about it.
        • JSR_FDED18 hours ago
          Cool thanks for the recommendation!
    • danoa day ago
      Honestly, when I read this book in 1982 or so it changed the trajectory of my life and career. It is an story of a bet-the-business project that occurred in real life. After reading I though I was late to the tech party, missed out on so much, and yet, here we are, 45 years later with incredible advancements and a career I couldn't have imagined. Tracy Kidder was a gem of an individual, just a wonderful person who was truly interested in others. I hope you'll read the book soon.
    • shona day ago
      Stop reading HN and read the book now. You’re welcome. ;)
    • pulvinara day ago
      It's unrelated to the book, other than the title.
    • engineer_22a day ago
      Soul of a New machine is a great read, never slow or self-gratifying, highly recommended
    • jnsaff2a day ago
      That's a great book to read, after that pick up The Cuckoo's Egg.
  • stackghosta day ago
    I also have a few machines I'm attached to. When I was fresh out of school I got a job at a startup writing PHP and bought myself an (at the time) brand new Thinkpad X220 with a Sandy Bridge i7 inside.

    My 9 year old has it now. The battery is toast but the machine still faithfully trundles along. It plays Rollercoaster Tycoon on Fedora Linux. We're building a robot together for her birthday, so I'll be trying to install the Arduino tool chain on it.

    I'll definitely miss that machine when it's no more.

    • assimpleaspossi18 hours ago
      Hmm. The desktop I'm using right now has an i7 in it and I do everything with it. Hmm.
      • wkjagt13 hours ago
        Which generation? Just i7 by itself doesn't mean much. I think the newest are like 14th generation? The X220 is only 2nd generation ("Sandy Bridge"), about 15 years old.
        • assimpleaspossi12 hours ago
          Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz (3403.48-MHz K8-class CPU). I think that's Ivy Bridge. I just don't pay attention. I think it's a year newer with a smaller die.
      • stackghost13 hours ago
        Not sure what your two "Hmm"'s are implying, but the i7 label has been reapplied to newer chips as time goes on, which is why I specified it was a Sandy Bridge-era chip.
    • ge96a day ago
      Lumia 920 for me, obsolete but I keep one around