Computer design: the microkids and the hardy boys: an inside look at how a maverick team from data general `rescued” the company by designing a competitive 32-bit superminicomputer in record time

In the fall of 1978 a journalist in his early 30s, Tracy Kidder, went on a sailing trip with a crew of strangers, among them an engineer named Tom West. During a storm off Maine, Mr. Kidder learned that Mr. West was, as another of their crew put it, “a good man in a storm.” The harder the wind blew and the more dangerous the conditions, the happier and more competent Mr. West became; crisis appeared to be his natural milieu.