With some sadness I learned of the passing of Tracy Kidder over the weekend past. He won the Pulitzer in 1981 for The Soul of a New Machine, a foundational work on early computing that captured what it was like developing the hardware in the days before everyone had a supercomputer in their pocket.
I was introduced to Soul during the process of working on my PhD, with one of the members of my candidacy committee sneaking it onto my reading list, to not only break up the technical reading, but to demonstrate how it was possible to humanize the writing on even the most dry technical subject.
Reading The Soul of a New Machine felt in some ways like watching the TV series Halt and Catch Fire, the AMC drama from the mid-twenty-teens that covered a similar period in the devlopment of computing hardware, though Kidder’s work didn’t have quite the same level of drama.
Not that his work was without it, however. Kidder wrote on a wide range of subjects, as can be seen here at his website, and many of them have that close, nearly anthropological study of people and their environments that often go beneath our notice. If Kidder is writing on a subject that is of interest to you, it would be worth your while to track down one of his works.
Rest in peace, Tracy Kidder.