The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

'We didn't have one!' cried the beaming press agent.Ĭompany engineers helped to design Westborough, and they made it functional and cheap. Driving up to the building one day with one of the company's public relations men, I asked, 'Who was the architect?' 'Westborough' is worldwide headquarters of the Data General Corporation. Some employees call the place 'Webo,' but most refer to it as 'Westborough,' after the name of the town inside whose borders the building happens to exist. This is Building 14A/B-14B was fastened seamlessly to 14A. Mounted on several corners of the roofs, and slowly turning, are little TV cameras. It has narrow windows, an American flag on a pole out front, a dish antenna on a latticed tower. A sign warns against leaving a car there without authority. Digital Equipment, Data General-there on the edge of the woods, those names seemed like prophecies to me, before I realized that the new order they implied had arrived already.Ī few miles north of the junction of Route 495 and the Massachusetts Turnpike, off an access road, sits a two-story brick building, surrounded by parking lots. They are going to and from commercial buildings that wear on their doors and walls descriptions of new enterprise. The roads around them fill up with cars before nine and after five. However, on many of the roads that lead back behind the highway's scenery stand not woods and relics, but brand-new neighborhoods, apartment houses, and shopping centers. Like Troy, this region contains evidence of successive sackings: in the pine and hardwood forests, which now comprise two-thirds of the state, many cellar holes and overgrown stone walls that farmers left behind when they went west riverside textile mills, still the largest buildings in many little towns, but their windows broken now, their machinery crumbling to rust and the business gone to Asia and down south. The highway traverses some of the ghost country of rural Massachusetts. Driving down 495, you passed some modern buildings, but they quickly disappeared and then for a while there would be little to see except the odd farmhouse and acres of trees.

About fifteen years later, although traffic went by in processions, stretches of the highway's banks still looked lonesome. F OR A TIME after the first pieces of Route 495 were laid down across central Massachusetts, in the middle 1960s, the main hazard to drivers was deer.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder