Many of us who worked in high tech jobs in the early eighties read Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine,” a book Wired called “the original nerd epic.” I couldn’t put it down until I had finished. It told the story of a dedicated team that put together a new computer for Data General Corporation. It was a story that is probably being re-lived year-in and year-out by squads of innovators in the silicon jungles around the world, from Route 128 in Boston to the Laptop factories of Shanghai.
In the last month or so I’ve met two people in passing who are close family members with people at Data General whose story Kidder told, Carl Carman’s wife and Tom West’s daughter. Small world.
In 1969, I read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. Twenty years later in my Berkeley neighborhood the author had a recycling collection route. Small world.
I got to thinking about the expectations of black and white people. Today I was touring a few of the buildings I expect to spend some time in this year, looking for good network access and libraries with nicely upholstered furniture. Would it surprise anyone to know that the library with the deepest leather couches happens to be the Library of the School of Library and Information Studies? The Sociology Graduate Library sort of pales by comparison. The SLIS library has expansive plate glass views of the lake, the sailboats below bobbing merrily on the water, students walking bicycles along the lake shore path. One carrel in the Sociology Library has a lake view through a window that looks like it belongs in a cell.
( “I see the sun come shining, from the west down to the east…”)
Speaking of which, here is a graphic I cribbed from Professor Oliver’s web page. Thinking about expectations and lives shaped by early associations, I couldn’t help but think of the huge number of young black men in Wisconsin who are being held in prison.
[tags]Soul on Ice, Soul of a new machine, small world[/tags]
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