This was recommended to me from the Amazon workplace article a few weeks back. Here is a great tale from 1980 of a tech company embracing the startup-competition-80hr-weeks method to push out a new computer under arbitrary deadlines, to hire smart kids and work them incessantly for the joy of getting to do something cool. All interwoven with a very detailed but hopefully readable account of how computers worked and were built at this mid-point in their history. I could relate to pretty much everything in here - hope I'm more of a Carl Alsing than anyone else, but still a world I'm happy to be looking mostly backwards to now. Tracy Kidder had great access during and after, a really well told story that is still all too relevant.