I woke up this morning with the name Ed de Castro in my head. Edson de Castro was the founder of late 1970s minicomputer company Data General. It was in the Boston area, where I did my undergrad in the early 1980s, so it was a familiar corporate name. I believe Ed de Castro even gave a large donation to my school when I was there. Years later, I learned my lab tech was a Data General employee and stayed in touch with Ed de Castro. But I didn’t really have any personal connection to him.

De Castro and Data General are mostly remembered for being the subject of Tracy Kidders Pulitzer Prize winning book The Soul of a New Machine. It documented the strange new world of tech start-ups, where vast new fortunes were being created and the world was being changed. We all read Soul of a New Machine as undergrads.

I googled Ed deCastro this morning and saw that he died recently. I didn’t see any mention of his passing.

But I did run across the short memoir from and early Data General employee, the former head of software and founder of Stratus Technologies. Not much was really written about the reality of these early rocket ride companies. I really enjoyed this bit of history.

Data General: The Fair Bastards