"Now, one day back at Data General, his weariness focused on the logic analyzer and the small catastrophes that come from trying to build a machine that operate

"Now, one day back at Data General, his weariness focused on the logic analyzer and the small catastrophes that come from trying to build a machine that operates in billionths of a second. On this occasion, he went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal: I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season." — from "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder