Showstopper
Showstopper is the dramatic, inside story of the creation of Windows NT, told by Wall Street Journal reporter G. Pascal Zachary. Driven by the legendary Bruce Cutler, a picked band of software engineers sacrifices almost everything in their lives to build a new, stable, operating system aimed at giving Micropsoft a platform for growth through the next decade of development in the computing business.Comparable in many ways to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, Showstopper gets deep inside the process of software development, the lives and motivations of coders and the pressure to succeed coupled with the drive for originality and perfection that can pull a diverse team together to create a program consisting of many hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Stats for nerds
17recommend
26mentions
22people
2008–2025years
73% recommend27% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Zachary's Showstopper book is a great account of Dave Cutler and WinNT.
- list of (most of) the books mentioned in this thread so far. I tried reading every comment but used chatGPT instead.
1. The Big Rich - Texas oil boom.
2. Barbarians at the Gate - Private equity origins.
3. Masters of Doom - John Carmack and Id Software.
4. Einstein by Walter Isaacson - Einstein's discoveries.
5. Houdini!!! - The escape artist and magician.
6. The Double Helix - DNA discovery.
7. Stress Test by Tim Geithner - Financial crisis.
8. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - Concentration camp survival.
9. The Chariots of Apollo - NASA's space program.
10. Across the Airless Wilds by Earl Swift - Development of the moon buggy.
11. Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox - Apollo missions.
12. The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr - Food supply chains.
13. The Prize by Daniel Yergin - Oil industry evolution.
14. Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson - Ambitious wreck divers.
15. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - Manhattan Project.
16. American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - Robert Oppenheimer.
17. Conquistador by Buddy Levy - Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs.
18. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - Water infrastructure in the American West.
19. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - The invention of flight.
20. Walt Disney by Neal Gabler - Vision and innovation in entertainment.
21. Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant - Invention of radar.
22. Insisting on the Impossible - Edwin Land and instant photography.
23. The Logic of Failure - Understanding and avoiding failure.
24. The Big Short by Michael Lewis - 2008 financial crisis.
25. The Box by Marc Levinson - Shipping container revolution.
26. Latitude by Nicholas Crane - Cartography innovations.
27. When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance - Space startups.
28. The Founders by Jimmy Soni - PayPal's early days.
29. The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester - Precision engineering.
30. The Little Engine That Could - Children's classic.
31. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - Success mechanics.
32. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight - Founding of Nike.
33. Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin - Building LIGO.
34. Freedom’s Forge - WWII industry mobilization.
35. Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes - Electrification by Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse.
36. The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough - Panama Canal construction.
37. Annapurna by Maurice Herzog - Climbing a Himalayan peak.
38. Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - Data General engineers.
39. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary - Development of Windows NT.
40. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand - WWII survival.
41. The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder - Defining the meter.
42. The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll - Tracking a hacker.
43. The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel - Srinivasa Ramanujan.
44. The Power Broker by Robert Caro - Robert Moses and New York infrastructure.
45. How Big Things Get Done - Large-scale project execution.
46. Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik - Xerox PARC.
47. Built by Roma Agrawal - Civil engineering insights.
48. The Will to Keep Winning by Daigo Umehara - Competitive gaming.
49. Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold - Low-temperature physics.
50. Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins - Apollo 11.
- 81. Failure is Not an Option by Gene Kranz
82. Mrs. P’s Journey by Phyllis Pearsall
83. River of Doubt by Candice Millard
84. Longitude by Dava Sobel
85. Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg
86. The Last Viking - A biography of Roald Amundsen
87. The Wager by David Grann
88. Simply Fly by Captain G. R. Gopinath
89. Engines That Move Markets by Alasdair G. M. Nairn
90. The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon
91. Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram
92. Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton
93. How to Make a Spaceship by Julian Guthrie
94. West with the Night by Beryl Markham
95. The Age of Uncertainty by Tobias Hürter
96. American Steel by Richard Preston
97. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary
98. Eccentric Orbits by John Bloom
99. The Great Bridge by David McCullough
100. Loonshots by Safi Bahcall
101. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming
102. Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner
103. The Evening Star by Henry S. F. Cooper
- If you want to learn more about NT, read "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" by G. Pascal Zachary
- As others have pointed out, NT was created by former DEC engineers, and was heavily based on a canceled DEC project named MICA. DEC sued Microsoft for stealing their IP (or at least threatened to sue), and in return, were compensated with over $100 million and, amongst other things, got a guarantee from MS to port NT to Alpha and provide support for it.
Sources:
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_...
https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...
The book "Showstopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary
- Since "Soul of a New Machine" and "Hackers" were already mentioned I'll throw out two that I really enjoyed.
"Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft", Zachary, G. Pascal, https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1416925
"Dealers of Lightning: XEROX-PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age", Hiltzik, Michael, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56563823-dealers-of-ligh...
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