Quotes from Tracy Kidder

In many cases, a small and daily growing computer company did not fall on hard times because people suddenly stopped wanting to buy its products. On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxiate on its own success.

It is not a large exaggeration to say that everything else in a computer exists in order to bring information swiftly to the ALU for manipulation; and for the ALU, adding is the mechanical equivalent of breathing. But

At age twenty-six, Virchow wrote passionately that terrible social conditions in an impoverished part of Germany called Upper Silesia were the cause of a malaria and dysentery epidemic. His recommendation to the German government: if it wanted to do something about the epidemic, it needed to end the malnutrition, overcrowding, and poor hygiene. Better yet, he added, allow for a full and unlimited democracy in Upper Silesia.

He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist.

When others write about people who live on the edge, who challenge their comfortable lives—and it has happened to me—they usually do it in a way that allows a reader a way out. You could render generosity into pathology, commitment into obsession. That's all in the repertory of someone who wants to put the reader at ease rather than conveying the truth in a compelling manner.

A great deal has been written on the question of how to motivate industrial workers. Presumably such literature arises because so many jobs have been made so trivial that few people can find any meaning at all in them.

Much of the engineering of computers takes place in silence, while engineers pace in hallways or sit alone and gaze at blank pages.

But he realized that Haiti was now so embedded in his mind and heart that he could never abandon the country so quickly.

Paul is the model of what should be done. He's not a model for how it has to be done. Let's celebrate him. Let's make sure people are inspired by him. But we can't say anybody should or could be just like him. He added, Because if the poor have to wait for a lot of people like Paul to come along before they get good health care, they are totally fucked.

Because if you're going to make a small inexpensive computer you have to sell a lot of them to make a lot of money. And we intend to make a lot of money.

When the veterans in the group were growing up, computers were quite rare and expensive, but Veres went to school in the age when anyone with a little money and skill could make up a small personal system. Veres says that what he does at home is different enough from what he does at work to serve as recreation for him. At work he deals with hardware; when he's at home, he focuses on software—reading programming manuals and creating new software for his own computer.

Everything is quantified," he said. "Whether it's the technology or the way people use it, it has an insidious ability to reduce things to less than human dimensions.

Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC's corporate organization. He felt that VAX was too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system by which various parts of the machine communicated with each other; for his taste, there was too much protocol involved. He decided that VAX embodied flaws in DEC's corporate organization.

Adopting a remote, managerial point of view, you could say that the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team inside a company an entrepreneurial spirit, which was channeled in the right direction by constraints sent down from the top. But it seems more accurate to say that a group of engineers got excited about building a computer.

West once said, "An analyzer costs ten thousand dollars. Overtime for engineers is free.

The view reminded me of the Haitian proverb "Beyond mountains there are mountains," which meant that when you'd solved one problem, you couldn't rest because you had to go on and solve the next.

Some problems are easy to find and hard to fix; some are hard to find and easy to fix; some go both ways.

The view reminded me of the Haitian proverb "Beyond mountains there are mountains," which meant that when you'd solved one problem, you couldn't rest because you had to go on and solve the next. The view of the Péligre Dam and its immense lake and the land it had drowned was, so to speak, another mountain to Farmer. It was a story of exploitation and disaster for at least a hundred thousand Haitians, and in one way or another, Farmer had to deal with it every day.

It was an IBM machine, archaic now but gaudy then. The university owned it, in effect, and it lay inside a room that none but the machine's professional caretakers could enter during the day. But Alsing found out that a student could just walk into that room at night and play with the computer. Alsing didn't drink much and he never took any other drugs. "I was a midnight programmer," he confessed.

Farmer would say, Clean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floors, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have a birthrights.

There are some things you just do because it's the right thing to do. And the outcome is out of my hands or in somebody else's hands. I want to believe there's value in that. You're doing everything you can for the patient, but you're not deluding yourself into thinking that what you do isn't worth doing because the person is going to die anyway.

The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them." This last was Farmer's favorite.

Infections and Inequalities

Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West