G. Pascal Zachary

What does it take to make great software? A focus on quality boarding on obsession, brilliance, long hours, personal sacrifice, and a leaving of that intangible called leadership. Showstopper stands besides The Mythical Man Month and The Soul of a New Machine in it's depiction of programming and technology around the creation of The Last Great OS.

Lead Engineer David Cutler and his team had a ambitious job, to make the first 'platform-independent operating system', a piece of software which show more would revolutionize personal computing by adding reliability and backwards compatibility, and make Microsoft very very wealthy. Over 4 years, they transformed a vague idea into working software, at the cost of $150 million, many broken marriages, and constant abuse and bullying. The sense I got from this book is that Cutler was a maniac, but perhaps the only type of person who could make something like NT work. I can only hope that the massive stock options the team got compensated for the emotional trauma. The human side is paramount in this story, but able analogies explain the inner workings of the PC.

These days, post-Zune, Windows phone, and the resurgence of Apple it's easy to mock Microsoft as a has been-a dinosaur limping along on monopoly market power and tech lock-in. But it serves us to remember that they were agile and innovative once. Cutler's messianic vision may have been justified, because 20 years later his code is still at the heart of the versions of Windows that we use.

*Disclosure: Gregg Zachary is a friend and colleague. show less

This cast of unpleasant, hypercompetitive, aggressive, unfeeling sociopaths working at BigCorp goes a long way to explaining why Windows NT (later XP) is the way it is.

The contrast with the idealistic soi disant "revolutionaries" at Apple (best told in Folklore) is huge.

As a folkloristic book, it does a poor job of telling the aspects of the story that would actually be interesting. It digresses into irrelevant biographies all over the place, which convey little more than rap sheet facts. It doesn't have a conception of what is interesting about technology. The writer is clearly very thin on the subject, presenting analogies about the functions of software in strangely distant and awkward terms. He thinks he's throwing in a little secret sauce by posting show more occasional snippets of source code or shell commands that don't mean anything to anyone, cargo cult style.

Written by a programmer intent to expose some of the key technical points about Windows NT, this could actually have been an interesting book from a historical perspective. In its present form it succeeds at stating little more than that the development of NT was an immense chaos and saw many clashes between individuals. It conveys some of the atmosphere in which the process took place. And despite the constant blustering about how monumental NT supposedly is for its time, it offers precious little technical information to explain this.

This edition of the book also suffers from very poor production, with various misprints and errors around the place as if no one had proofread it. show less

A good account of Bush's career. Not quite the 'engineer of the American century' but important in steering the Manhattan Project and in influencing postwar American science policy - although arguably many western countries followed the same route.