The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder An Atlantic Monthly Press Book - 1981

(Chapter 9-10) Chapter 9: A Workshop This chapter mainly talk about a workshop that West have in house. But the main point is not the workshop itself. From the workshop, the writer is trying to give illustration what kind of person Mr. West is, his motivation, ambition, and. And it seemed that the writer was trying to make us, the reader, feel about the frustration West bear at eagle project West spend about 12 hour a day working at his office. This routine and the burden he take have made him bored. One day he said that he wished he could bring his guitar to work and play with some of the youngster in the group who were musicians. Some night he would go away from Eagle and play music with friends and acquaintances, some times all night long and he will drive right in to work and become once again a though, grim-looking manager. West had previously owned a new and smaller house in the vicinity. A wooded plaque near the front door announces that it was erected in 1780. For some years latter the residents have to work hard adding things on. So does West. He has to make the repair. But when there was nothing left for him to do in the way of renovation, he sold it and bought the farm, with leaking roofs, and sagging, rotting barns. In several years he had almost completely restored it. Tom repairs every thing. Some of his works were the rebuilt roof; a room which no corner was square was transformed room to kitchen; and the mahogany coaching table in the living room. His Crowning domestic achievement was his basement workshop. On the workshop there were several chambers. In one sat most of machine: a lathe, a shaper, radial arm say, a band saw, drill press, a sanding machine, and two grinding machine and 2 goggles near by. In the other corner there was a spacious bench with a handsome vise, and hanging above it , wood clamps, chisels, backsaw, cross cut saw, coping saws, key hole saw. Everything in that place was ready there and very organized. A pencil sharper, music, phone, chair, beer, hammer, coat. That entire thing was practically ever invented right in is place. On the post and windowsills you can find some photograph an post card. One card read: its easy to do it yourself. There are also a place for his farming equipment, metal working, and a store room for keeping smaller parts. When West was in high school and the family was residing in Lincoln, Nebraska, he always working on things. He once bought a run-down little sailboat, stripped it to bare wood, and build it , until it did gleam. West went to Amherst College, in western Massachusetts, where he studied the natural science. His academic achievement was not so good. He was considered as an underachiever and should take underachiever program which is a program for young man whose brain seemed much better than their grade were expelled for a year, so they might improve their character. West become the first underachiever. He spends his exile in Cambridge, Massachusetts, unrepentantly playing guitar. West play in coffeehouses, know some of famous folksinger before they become ones. When he returned to Amherst, he decided to become an engineer. However, West didnt want to be any old sort of engineer. He wants to have carrier in space program and help building the electronic equipment, monumental in it complexity that would send man to the moon. He managed to get a job with the Smithsonian Institution. West built and carried all over the world to various satellite tracking stations, a series of digital clock that told exactly the right time. After seven years, however, he quit.

After seeing one of his friends in Cambridge has become a famous musician, West want to take up the guitar seriously again. But at that time, the Vietnam War was occurring and to avoiding the military draft he have to join companies that were making things for it. Then he decided to become a computer engineer. With what he has learned in Smithsonian, the design of digital circuitry, and another six months self study of computer he manage to be employed by the RCA. The early time was not so successful. He got what he said as dumb job. But in the end, just before he have to change the job because of the lost of RCA to IBM, he got to work on project that interest him and got registered on his name. After RCA, West was working for Data general. The first project was the first Eclipse. During the debugging time West was ill every morning before work. The observer Rosmarie see that as time went in the Eagle project, West seemed to grow skinnier and skinnier, as if it was consuming his flesh. When she come to his office West must be starring at a paper and dont notice her standing in the doorway. She cannot figure out why West working that hard even, from her perspective, the company didnt want the project under taken at all. West particularly didnt love computer very much. He hate the fact that a machine is end up with making people become so dumb. In his office, he rarely put a computer. He only put the computer on his office for special occasion such as debugging EAGLE. He couldnt wait to get the computer out of his sight. Some time he also talk about the rapid development of computer and become obsolete. He said that computer that you design now will just become a hot box for two years. But building them and getting it out of the door is still interested West. Dave Bernstein, a veteran of FHP and EGO, share the same with West. Both of them enjoy for being able to master a machine, both building and repairing the machine. What the machine was didnt matter, but since the computer is the most complex of all man- made things, repairing and building them pose interesting challenge for him. Eagle in this regard, was something special. There were some interesting statements from West about Eagle. One of them was when he said,Some notion of insecurity and challenges, of where the edge are, of finding out what you cant do, all within a perfectly justifiable scenario. Its for the kind of guy who likes to climb up mountains. Even though west already examine, build, and repair many machine in his entire life but the fact that of a string of previous success could imply the imminence of failure. Regarding this, West only said with a small smile, Realistically, you gotta lose one sometime. Actor Tom West De Castro Cotton Mather Rosemarie Seale Ed Rasala Dave Bernstein Amherst College Smithsonian Institution RCA IBM

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Chapter 10: The Case of The Missing NAND Gate This chapter mainly talk about a problems when the Eagle project is going trough the debugging phase. Due date for debugging phase has been passed, and Eagle still not running because of problem in its accelerator. This problem also caused by debugging methods that used by Eagle's debugging team. According to the Eclipse Group's theory, debugging process didn't require to be proven by exhaustive analysis that the machine was in all its details logically correct. A program have to be made to gain this purpose. Once in a while someone would find a problem, fix it temporarily, and move on. The engineer would plan to come back and make a proper repair but might forget about it, and weeks later it would cause some mysterious failure. They loss some time that way. In the other time it is because of unreliable mechanical connection causing flakey failures. Moreover, Data General only have a micro diagnostic program for 16-bit Eclipse. The development of micro diagnostic program for 32-bit Eagle is going slowly and this brings Fear to Rasala. Eagle have special parts known as accelerators that used to eliminate the bottleneck between the machine and its storage. The accelerator is consist of parts, Instruction Processor (IP) and Sys Cache, both of them work in a different way. IP making assumptions about what the next instruction in a program will be, while it is telling the computer what instruction to be execute right now. The IP has a small storage compartment called I-cache in which it keeps instruction that are likely to be required next and also instruction that have been used recently. The Sys Cache also makes assumptions about what the computer will be asked to do next, but its contains a storage compartment larger than IP. Sys Cache also have a roles to keep handy commonly used instruction and data, so if the IP doesn't have necessary information to order up next step in the program, it can get quickly from the Sys Cache. To visualize IP and Sys Cache in Eagle memory system, imagine a funnel where at the narrow end are IP, Sys Cache in the middle, and the boards of Main Memory are in the widest funnel's mouth. The accelerators are throwing out blocks of information and they must assure that they are always consistent with Main Memory and with each other. But if inconsistency between IP and Sys Cache happen, it can make IP going to order the machine to execute the wrong instruction. The machine will fail running a diagnostic program, so the debuggers cannot figure out the real problem. That is the worst sort of problem that they were encountering in Eagle. In this chapter, 3 member of Hardy Boys, Ken Holberger, Jim Veres, and Jim Guyer work together to solve this accelerator problem. Ken Holberger is a chief sergeant detective of Hardy Boys. Holberger have a trim black beard. His behavior is just like West, the way he walks down the hall, the shape of his mouth when he gets ready to talk, he also embodies the assertion that West have. Holberger join the company three years ago and now he bear the responsibility under Rasala for the details of the hardware of this major CPU. Rasala and Holberger are good friend. The only faults that Rasala found on Holberger was that he sometimes moves too quickly and makes careless mistake. There are also a problem about Holbergers in the lab. He is known as the one of the tough guy in the basement. If he working on a problem with several other engineer and feels that too many are involved then hell simply ignore what one or two of them have to say and eventually theyll get angry and go somewhere else. Like Rasala, Holberger sometime worries about playing the guy. Holberger have a great passion in doing his job. For him his job was very challenging, interesting and yet prestigious. He trashed out the plan for implementation of the memory management system in many long, loud sessions with Wallach. Holberger designed most of IP in Eagle. Jim Veres is one of the Hardy boys team member. He help Holberger to debug in eagle project. Between Veres and Holberger there exists a kind of technical understanding that outrun the power of speech. To Veres Holberger is very quick with his superior knowledge of Eagle design,

Holberger can fill in the details for Veres. And holberger was impressed with Veres, and calls him one of the star. Veres was given the responsibility for the IP, and designed large part of it with Holbergers assistance. Veres like to tinker with his computer when he was at home. At work he deals with hardware and at home he focuss on software. He like to tinker, and to build one. Jim Guyers is also one of the Hardy boys team. Rasala said that Guyer is A mechanic, he likes to fix things. Guyers has stubborn personality. Guyers has brown beard that makes his face looks rest inside an oval frame. At a bachelor , he likes to go rock-climbing. He was those whom West must have had in mind when he said that computer engineering was sort of thing that appealed to people who love to climb up a mountain. Practically he love to tinker anything. He went to MIT as an undergraduate and went to northwestern for a year of graduate school. After three years working at Data General and he likes the pace. He has become favorite to both Rasala and West mainly because of his attitude toward debugging. At the moment Guyers appear to much less interested in the board he helped to design, the IOC, then he is in some of the other boards, particularly the IP. He likes to work on IP because he doesnt know how it works and it give more challenge to him. Guyer and Veres were working together on order to debug the machine. But difference is Guyer like to work at the night. He usually leaves office at 3 in the morning than a few hour later veres come and continue what Guyer have done. Both Guyer and Veres were very head strong. One day Holberger give an instruction to run the diagnostic program called Eclipse 21 for both Coke and Gollum. This program is extreme repetitiouness where every test is contains a number of subtest, each one of which consist of dozen of instruction. The program, including all repetitions of the subtest is repeated a large number of time before pass is complete. Veres has already done this, and the result is Gollum ran 921 passes of Eclipse 21 with 30 failures, same result to the Coke. Even the number of failure is small, it is a bad news because it's hard to locate the cause of failure that crops up only once in a while. Holberger and Veres hook the probes of two logic analyzer to various part of Gollum, and they set the analyzers so that they will snap their picture and printed listing of the steps when the machine fails. They run the diagnostic program which is telling the machine to jump away from the stream of instruction it's executing and go get a new instruction. This new instruction should direct the machine to go right back to the place where it was, before it took the jump. From this diagnostic they figure out that the machine did in fact jump to the right instruction, it did return to the right place, but when it got there, it execute the wrong next instruction. Jim Guyer comes in and he began to join in the diagnostic process. When he look at the logic analyzer, he found a clue. He examines addresses, and realized that when the machine fails, the target instruction is supposed to be in the address 21766. And what is interesting is that an instruction exactly before this failed one has successfully performs and located at address 21765. Further analysis from the diagnostic have realized that when the target instruction is switched from 21765 to 21766, the IP receives this command and looks through I-cache. However, in the I-cache the target instruction is still at 21765, and location 21766 contains an error message. In short, the Icache contains an outdated piece of memory. Next, Veres examines addresses rather different from Guyer. A group of neighborhoods address called blocks created. Each block contains 256 address location and has a unique address called tags. Veres sees in his analyzer that at the moment when the machine fails, the tags of the blocks in I-cache is 21. But the tag for what should be the corresponding block in the Sys Cache is 45. The two tags should be the same. Veres goes searching to find out which one is right. Veres continue to performs JSR and Return to Gollum. When he get the picture from the analyzer, he examined the result. At the 122nd iteration of the sub test, I-cache contains the block instructions

with tag number 21. At the 151nd iteration, Veres has observed the Sys Cache instructing IP to replace tag number 21 with 45. However, at the 158nd iteration, the IP has disobeyed the order and I-cache is still harboring tag number 21. A few more picture show that IP getting its signal crossed. When IP get the signal from Sys Cache to remove tag 21, before it can obey that signal is gets changed by another signal coming from another part of the machine. The solution is takes the material form of a circuit called a NAND gate, which reproduces the not and function of Boolean algebra. With the NAND gate, the arrival from the second signal can be delayed, so that IP will always have time to clear out an old block before it's asked to do something else. After NAND gate installed, the program still produced a failures. Veres takes out the NAND gate and run the failing program, but the machine still commits the new failure. So the problem is not the NAND gate. Greatly relieved, Holberger found that they have the IP board out on the extender. They put the IP back in its proper place and the failure no longer occurs. In the end, Gollum successfully negotiates all the basic Eclipse diagnostic, including Eclipse 21. Actor Ed Rasala Dave Epstein Ken Holberger Jim Veres Jim Guyer Hardy Boys Diagnostics Support Group HEATHKIT flakey failure Micro Diagnostic Program Eclipse 21 Logic Analyzer Instruction Processor I-cache Sys Cache Main Memory JSR & Return

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