The fact that truth is stranger than fiction accounts for part of the appeal of historical and biographical stories. A big part of the appeal, however, comes from our desire to be “flies on the wall” while momentous events are occurring, to be witnesses, to be insiders. When the stories feature important people, such as Lee Iacocca or John Sculley, we also learn from their thoughts, motives, and actions as they face major trials. We wonder how they are different from ourselves . . . and how they are the same.

Lundstrom has openly patterned his book after Tracy Kidder’s successful The soul of a new machine [1]. Lundstrom also tries to make everyday business and technology issues exciting. Kidder succeeded, but Lundstrom fails. Kidder focused on a small group of people working on a specific project over a relatively short time period. Lundstrom, however, tries to fill a broad canvas covering a time span of 30 years, from 1955 to 1985; geography, from Palo Alto to Philadelphia; two major companies, Sperry Rand and Control Data; and many, many people.

The result, for me, is somewhat dull. The book boils down to a list of dates and events. There is little tension and suspense. People break away from Sperry Rand to form Control Data Corporation, but we get no sense of the personal anguish and excitement that must have been felt by the key players. Later, Seymour Cray leaves CDC to form his own company. Again, I feel that we are on the outside looking in, watching the battle on television. Lundstrom does not show us the taste and smell of the combat.

Part of the reason for this is that Lundstrom is an engineer rather than a writer, while Kidder is primarily a writer, and both Iacocca and Sculley used ghost writers. Lundstrom also was on the outside looking in, as are most of us during major events such as these.

The best parts of the book are really those in which Lundstrom describes his personal experiences and feelings, motivated either by people or technology. It is fun to read, for example, about the problems of engineering change control on the physically huge Univac IIs and to feel his enthusiasm about the airline ticket machine that he helped build and sell. It is over these mundane issues that Lundstrom shed his blood, not on the shag carpets of boardrooms.

In the end, this book lacks drama, but it is real and honest. I could not in good conscience give Kidder’s book to fledgling engineers and say that this is the way they will spend their careers. Perhaps they will have one or two periods as intense as the one Kidder describes, but Lundstrom’s book tells it like it really is. It is sometimes exciting, often boring, sometimes affected by poorly-understood forces beyond our control. It doesn’t make good reading, but it isn’t a bad life.