TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 173 A Few Good Men from Umvac. By David E. Lundstrom. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. Pp. xii + 227; illustrations. $19.95. David Lundstrom, an electrical engineer and former Control Data executive, was first hired by Sperry Rand in 1955 to work on Univac II, successor to the first general purpose, commercial digital computer. From the vantage of his thirty years of experience, Lundstrom offers a rare insider’s view of the evolution of key elements of the computer in dustry. His purpose is to remedy what he considers some popular mis conceptions about the nature of the development process and the role of individual engineers in it. He also draws several pointed and wellsupported lessons concerning common managerial mistakes in direct ing development projects. In addition, the author provides succinct and lucid explanations of the origin, operation, and evolution of many sub sidiary technologies, such as operating systems, tape drives, card read ers, high-speed printers, and CRT displays. But this book deals primarily with the process of bringing tech nology to market rather than with the technology itself. Lundstrom is particularly interested in the conditions determining the success or failure of development projects. He discusses several of these in some detail: the Naval Tactical Display System, the Control Data 6600 and 7600 series mainframes, optical character readers, airline reservation and ticketing systems, and Ticketron terminals. In reviewing these and other projects with which he was personally involved, Lundstrom does an excellent job of describing the interaction of organizational politics, personal ego, technological efficiency, and economic forces. He gives life to what, in academic journals, often appears solely as the interplay of variables. In this account, the engineering genius is usually the hero of suc cessful projects, and the technically incompetent but ambitious man ager the villain of unsuccessful ones. Lundstrom is particularly good at demonstrating, at the level of engineering practice, why joint de velopment projects, design by committee, in-house competition, and other common managerial devices often lead to disaster. He also shows how success or failure in several instances hinged on personality, ob serving that “every year hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted on development projects that are clearly doomed to failure because of the leader’s ego and refusal to admit a mistake was made” (p. 137). In contrast, citing the examples of former colleagues Seymour Cray and Jack Rabinow, he underscores the importance of “the single bril liant designer,” sharp point of what he calls the “development wedge.” Lundstrom certainly succeeds in rendering a more complex and nuanced picture of computer development, as well as in making an interesting contribution to what Sigfried Giedion called “anonymous history.” But while the author aims at revealing the daily life of the engineer, he shows us instead the role of the manager. The typical venue in his book is the conference room, not the laboratory. 174 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE One might object that this microscopic approach, this emphasis on individual personalities and specific corporate cultures, necessarily neglects the role of more general social and economic conditions af fecting innovation. Organizational politics and discordant personali ties may hamper development in one company, but in an industry as competitive as the computer industry, other, more congenial organi zational environments are not lacking. The formation of Control Data itself, by disgruntled former employees of Sperry Rand and Univac, is a case in point. The debate over the autonomy of development seems often to involve a confusion of these two planes, the organi zational and the social. Behind office doors, as this memoir suggests, personality may rule. But the invisible hand of efficiency (or profit) may keep opening those doors until it finds the right office. Gary Wren Dr. Wren teaches courses on technology and society, social theory, and research methodology in the Social Sciences Department of the University of California at Berkeley. The Post-Industrial Utopians. By Boris Frankel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Pp. xii + 303; notes, index. $35.00 (cloth); $12.50 (paper). How readers respond to Boris Frankel’s Post-Industrial Utopians will most likely depend on whether or not they agree with his assumptions about contemporary problems...