, , , , , Book Review , Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton Book Review by Jakob Nielsen, Bellcore, USA This book has been described as The Soul of a New Machine meets A Day in the Ltd. Unfortunately, it is neither, and it suffers in comparison with these two insightfial works. DeiCing Gravity is a photojournalistic report of the events leading to the often-delayed introduction of the Newton in August 1993. Interestingly, the book arrived about one month after I finally received my Newton and about two months after the last event depicted in the book. Such rapid production of a book is in itself a reflection of modern information technology, though of course it could have been out even faster on the Internet. Basically, the photographer Doug Menuez followed the Newton development, marketing, and management teams through a period of about two years, and his photographs are presented intertwined with a text outlining the six-year history of the project. Unfortunately, the text and photos are poorly integrated, with the pictures and descriptions of the same events often occurring many pages apart without a cross-reference. McGuffin.1 The suffering is made very explicit and the rewards, motivation, and technological advances are downplayed. I have never seen a book with so many pictures of exhausted people sleeping on floors, slouching in chairs, almost passing out in Parisian taxis, and pulling allnight debugging sessions only sleeping while waiting for the compiler (one of the few cases where slow response times may have saved the users' sanity). The book is certainly not a celebration of achievement and the advancement of humanity through international collaboration even though it could have been, given the characteristics of the project (the handwriting recognition was implemented by a Russian team which is only mentioned in passing and not shown on any photos, and the CPU was British). Most of the photographs contribute very little to the story of the Newton and its development except for the everpresent theme of exhaustion and overwork. They do have considerable merit as works of art, and I would have been exhilarated to see them in an exhibition at the International Center for Photography or some other venue where I would not have expected to learn about the workings of a major computer project. For example, page 00:98 shows a hand holding a preliminary version of Newton in front of the new "Arch of Triumph" in La Ddfense outside Paris. The caption for this picture only reads "Newton in Paris. September 1992." Except for people who happen to know that Apple's European headquarters are in La Ddfense, readers are left wondering what the Newton was doing in ¢ McGuffin Is the expressionused by Alfred Hitchcock to denote whatever object serves as the ostensible motivation for theplot while being irrelevant to the actual events in the film. A typical McGuffin would be a microfilm that is chased by severalteams of agents but is never actuallydeveloped. front of that particular building ¢ The image does look great, though, contrasting the Scandinavian formalism of the angular monument with the curved organic design of the Newton (the Newton in this picture looks particular good as it was a design with a curved cover--I hope the designers donate some of these early models to the Museum of Modern Art's design collection). The contrast is even greater for viewers who know the seductive feel of the Newton's surface material. Both text and pictures are very thin on coverage of the actual design of the Newton. There are no comparative pictures of the various physical designs that were tried, and there are no pictures at all that show screen designs ¢ Except for a few photographs of Larry Tesler and two paragraphs referring briefly to user testing, the user interface team has been left out of the book. In general, there is very little information about the content of the development work, as the book prefers to highlight the work for its own sake and the trade show promotions. In summary, this book cannot be recommended as a way to gain insights into the history and design of a major new user interface or computer technology. It can be recommended for a striking set of images that are aesthetically interesting, for its depiction of the exhaustion that accompanies intense projects, and for some watered-down reports of management intrigue. Even though the book was disappointing, I am still glad on balance that I bought DeiCingGravity and it will fit nicely next to Odysseyon my bookshelf. The Soul of a New Machine told the story of the lives and adventures of the engineers actually designing and building the Eclipse MW8000, with the main schism being technical differences between the hardware people and the software people. In contrast, DeWingGravitycould be called "A Tale of Two Valleys," with its main source of tension being the comparison between the glitter of the marketing jet set led by John Sculley and the dungeon-like confinement of the hackers led by Steve Capps. Many of the photographs are dominated by harsh black tones as if to emphasize the isolation of the project participants from the organic world. DeWing Gravityis not really about the development project or computer technology, or even about the n e w machine. It is about people suffering through adversity to deliver a DeiCing Gravity: The Making of Newton, by Doug Menuez (photography) and Markos Kounalakis (text). Beyond Words Publishing, Inc., Hillsboro, OR, 1993. ISBN 0-941831-94-9, $29.95. SIGCHI Bulletin January1994 l&lume26, Number 1

/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/book-review-defying-gravity-the-making-of-newton-by-markos-kounalakis-yDFwWsPnkb