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.