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 David 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.
Showstopper
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By stealie
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
This was an enjoyable book. The author struck a nice balance regarding the technical details versus general interest. I just wanted to mention the intolerable amount of typos in the Kindle edition. One programmer's name changed from Horne to Home, and back and forth at least a half dozen times in as many pages. Does the print version suffer this badly from typos?
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By Durcy
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
Reading this book, pretty much in one go, felt like a mix of "Pirates of Silicon Valley" and "Inside Windows". There is enough technical content to prevent this book from being shallow (although the distinction between "code writers" and "testers" is ultimately wrong because testers in MS are not people who aimlessly click around, but write elaborate test suites instead - this is mentioned in the book but is not very clear), but the real value is in the personal angle. Author describes the life of NT project through people's stories about the development of the product - direction changes, added features, bug fixing marathons - and the big personal toll it takes on their lives.
As a former MS employee, many situations feel familiar to me, however, many things are different now. Teams are bigger, stock options are gone and the culture has changed dramatically towards Dilbert-style, however, there are still teams with great leaders who can rally people to deliver great products.
Finally, use of real people's stories and especially their conflicts to describe the process of building complex software is very valuable to anyone who follows MS since many of the young eager people who worked on NT went on to become big shots at MS - from Bob Muglia to Dave Treadwell. Also, this book finally explained to me why Dave Cutler's red jaguar was parked at the spot closest to the entrance of the building.
As a former MS employee, many situations feel familiar to me, however, many things are different now. Teams are bigger, stock options are gone and the culture has changed dramatically towards Dilbert-style, however, there are still teams with great leaders who can rally people to deliver great products.
Finally, use of real people's stories and especially their conflicts to describe the process of building complex software is very valuable to anyone who follows MS since many of the young eager people who worked on NT went on to become big shots at MS - from Bob Muglia to Dave Treadwell. Also, this book finally explained to me why Dave Cutler's red jaguar was parked at the spot closest to the entrance of the building.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book was originally written in 1994 and reissued in 2008 with a new "Afterward" that provides a bit of the story after NT shipped. That new afterward mostly chides Microsoft for coming late to Internet and mobile software without mentioning the fact that Windows NT went on to become the underpinning of all of Microsoft's OS projects with Win2k.
As for the rest of the book, there are shortcomings in both the prose and the production. In terms of the prose-- it's simply hard to sum up a 5 year project in a book of this size, particularly if your goal is to cover the project from the perspective of multiple participants. The book never dives very deep and its characters are mostly reduced to cardboard cutouts who replay their roles chapter after chapter. Having said that, this is one of the very few books about Microsoft that includes significant participation on the part of the actual people involved, so it's worth a read on that front.
In terms of the production-- the 2008 reissue of this book is rife with blatant typos (one or more per page) and formatting problems. My guess is that the original manuscript was lost and the new book was generated by optical character recognition of a printed copy of the original book. For whatever reason, the new printing itself is problematic-- rather than the smooth fonts normally seen on all modern printed pages, the dots making up each of the printed characters is visible, as if this new version were printed on a dot matrix printer from the book's original era. The printing issues are surprisingly distracting.
As for the rest of the book, there are shortcomings in both the prose and the production. In terms of the prose-- it's simply hard to sum up a 5 year project in a book of this size, particularly if your goal is to cover the project from the perspective of multiple participants. The book never dives very deep and its characters are mostly reduced to cardboard cutouts who replay their roles chapter after chapter. Having said that, this is one of the very few books about Microsoft that includes significant participation on the part of the actual people involved, so it's worth a read on that front.
In terms of the production-- the 2008 reissue of this book is rife with blatant typos (one or more per page) and formatting problems. My guess is that the original manuscript was lost and the new book was generated by optical character recognition of a printed copy of the original book. For whatever reason, the new printing itself is problematic-- rather than the smooth fonts normally seen on all modern printed pages, the dots making up each of the printed characters is visible, as if this new version were printed on a dot matrix printer from the book's original era. The printing issues are surprisingly distracting.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Tries for too broad an audience
The people who would be interested in this book are computer geeks, like me. We don't have to get an explanation of what an operating system is, or what a driver is. Read more
Published 17 days ago by Karla K
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating content, marred by exceedingly poor editing
Showstopper! tells the tale of how a group of engineers at Microsoft worked their tails (and relationships) off to build NT, including even before it was to be Windows NT. Read more
Published 2 months ago by James N Dooley
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting tale of the birth of Windows NT
This was an interesting read overall, especially if you're a computer person. Learning about the personalities and the principles behind the world's most ubiquitous operating... Read more
Published 2 months ago by J.M. Diener
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Soul of the Microsoft Machine
Showstopper! is a classic and quite a special book. It is the story of building the first version of Microsoft Windows NT. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Bas Vodde
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential reading for the computer geek.
Essential reading for the geek minded. One of the best books written about Microsoft. Really well written and detailed about how an OS was created from the ground up and given a... Read more
Published 13 months ago by James Fallon
5.0 out of 5 stars
High-Tech Thriller or Business Book?
Disclosure: I am a former Microsoft employee and do know some of the individuals named in this book personally. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Chris Moran
2.0 out of 5 stars
skip it
As a folkloristic book, it does a poor job of telling the aspects of the story that would actually be interesting. Read more
Published on January 17, 2011 by Martin Matusiak
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic read
This book may be almost 20 years old but it is still a riveting read. I don't 100% agree with the author's recent addendum to the book, but it's interesting to contrast his... Read more
Published on December 1, 2010 by mech4bg
5.0 out of 5 stars
The origin of many software development phrases
This book documents the origin of many of the phrases that we now take for granted in software development. The colorful Mr. Read more
Published on October 12, 2010 by John
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Read
1. if you have the smallest interest in Software Development, or any complex system development
2. if you want to know how your computer innards are created
3. Read more
2. if you want to know how your computer innards are created
3. Read more
Published on June 11, 2010 by A. Finderle
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