Show-Stopper!
Including numerous interviews with the people that made Microsoft's modern-day operating system possible, G. Pascal Zachary weaves an intricate tale about the personalities, businesses, and relationships in Show-stopper!, a fascinating historical account about the making of Windows NT.
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2008–2025years
70% recommend30% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- One of the original design requirements for NT was that it be portable between different CPU architectures, it was one of the driving forces behind its creation.
So much so in fact, Microsoft developed NT 3.1 first on non-x86 architectures (i860 and MIPS), then later ported to x86, to ensure no x86 specific code made it in.
NT supported quite a few architectures:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms
"Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible and PC-98 platforms, and for DEC Alpha and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995"...
NT is a pretty interesting bit of PC history, I can highly recommend the book "Show Stopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary that recounts its development, and also dives a bit into why making the OS portable across CPU architectures was so important to the team at the time.
- I love books about writing/creating new software/hardware. One I can recommend, about Windows NT is: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Windows-Gene...
Does anyone here know about any book(s) on the VAX, or indeed on any of DEC's machines, or IBM's stuff (which were - probably still are - beautifully engineered) come to that? I'm aware of "Big Blue", but that is mostly about IBM business practices.
- One of the most pivotal moments in my software engineering career came from reading the leaked NT source code (6-7 years ago) in conjunction with reading the Showstopper[1] book. The NT leak is particularly fascinating because it included all of the author history, so you can see exactly what files Dave Cutler worked on. The book goes into detail about how we ended up with things like kernel modules having pageable sections -- which is fascinating in its own right.
The book describes Cutler coming in and revamping certain assembly routines and you can see exactly what routines are being talked about in the actual source code.
Cutler's code was (and I'm sure still is) absolutely beautiful C code. It really impacted the way I write NT-style C code.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...
- Zachary's Show Stopper covers this ground in a very readable manner, and gives a lot of useful detail on Dave Cutler's design ideas, and DEC VAX VMS background.
- Dave Cutler is, seemingly, a good example of this. If you have not read it, I recommend the book Show Stopper! by G. Pascal Zachary, about the development of Microsoft Windows NT under his leadership.
- Agreed -- this book is mesmerizingly good. Last year, we had a discussion of "Show Stopper!" with G. Pascal Zachary that also featured Jessamyn West, daughter of Tom West (of "Soul of a New Machine" fame)[0]. It was a fascinating discussion (technical difficulties with Twitter Spaces aside!).
