Introduction

What was it like to stand in the breach, with nobody else to take the decisions, and do-overs are too late? Margaret Hamilton, the first programmer hired for the Apollo project at MIT, explained:

Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers; no time to be beginners.

When it was “nobody but us,” our decisions and solutions were shaped by constraints. At Cray Research constraints and barriers pointed us to the best point of leverage. To remain the best in the world, we had no other option. But before considering leverage, we carefully identified and proved relevant capabilities. Those capabilities showed us what solutions might be plausible.

We developed a world-class heuristic: if it wasn’t fun, it probably wasn’t worth doing. We “laid it all out on the stage,” so to speak, and refused to be distracted by the fact that something had never been done before.

These attitudes did not begin with Cray Research. In fact Soviet technology followed a parallel path throughout the early Cold War because similar constraints tend to shape similar solutions.

This forced way of working, where responsibility could not be abstracted away, has been mostly lost to time. Therefore this book is designed as a primary source document that demonstrates and draws you into how we looked at technology and interrelated systems. This book is designed to shift how you look at the development of technology, both hardware and software. This book embodies and demonstrates lessons learned directly from pioneers of digital computing.

If you are looking for affirmations, founder mythology, tips, bullet points, or quotable takeaways, this book is not for you. If you expect explanations without responsibility, or abstractions without consequences, this book is not for you.

Skimming will not work. Passive reading will fail. Why? Because we had no time to be beginners, no choice but to be pioneers. If you are here to experience that stressful environment that birthed modern computing, this book is for you.

If you relate to any of these questions:

• Why do I understand systems but not how experts think?
• Why do many computing histories seem to be missing the “why”?
• Why do I only see successful results and not how engineering decisions were actually made under existential pressure?

You are in the right place.