Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

I must say, I just finished this book and it was fantastic. From the consumer side, I have sat and wondered many times what happens during the production of an OS. I remember the drum beat running up to Win '95 and I guess that will be the next one I hunt down. This book is a HISTORICAL DRAMA. If you didn't know the outcome you would be held in suspense! At times, I had to remind myself that it DID SHIP!The David Cutler part of the story is enthralling. Since he is so reclusive, it is remarkable that he would even be interviewed. In the back of the book it list who was interviewed and it must have been his children and ex-wife(s) in the list. Eventually, a biography of Cutler (whether authorized or not) would be a fantastic gift to the community.Congrats to the author on a fantastic read. I fully recommend it. But, it left me with a question that may never be able to be answered: If a project such as this were to be taken on today with modern programming tools (IDE, Internet, ect, ect) how long would it have taken and how much better/worse would the end product have been? If you take Microsoft's new approach to Visual Studio, the team approach, you might would think they built a product like that because of what they learned in projects such as NT. How many project hit brick walls, like Cairo, or as mentioned in the book "Microsoft's first in house build from scratch database system." This is just two projects that fell to the cutting room floor. How many more could there have been that would have "made it" to "ship mode" if modern tools and communications were introduced?

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.

Great detail on how Windows NT was created. Lots of personal details. Probably more than most readers would want to know. As a computer user of 60 years, I found it interesting.

The book contains the all-too-familiar struggles and joy of programming, this time when creating the Windows NT operating system for existing Intel and the newcomer Mips microprocessors.

This book is a 2008 update to the original 1994 release. Unfortunately even that is a bit dated now with references to Nokia being more influential than Microsoft in setting new digital standards especially in the wireless arena. That hat was passed to Apple and Nokia is now owned by Microsoft. In addition, the book mentions that David Cutler went on to work on the Cairo project but no mention is made in the update that the project was canceled in 1996.Overall it is an enjoyable read and reminds me a lot of "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It is interesting to see the personalities at work on the NT project and the various clashes between the various teams. Much like what happened at Data General with the development of what become the MV/8000.

As a historical account the book is interesting, but if you are looking for ground-breaking management insights you might be disappointed. Also, as other reviewers have pointed out, it's a bit repetitive and would have benefited from tighter editing. Still, it's a valuable piece of tech history and while I'm not much of a Windows user, after reading this book my respect for NT has increased enormously.

If you have read and like the style of “masters of doom” or “the soul of a new machine” or “open” you’ll love this book. A great look into Microsoft in its rapid ascent and a look into what it took to produce something we took for granted back then in NT (and in many ways still do as the foundation for Windows today).

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. Grueling hours were used to fix never-ending bugs and deal with ever-changing scope. This book wants to be a software story equivalent to Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" hardware story, but fails due to a lack of technical details, poor organization, and general lack of editing.While the story is very interesting, the reading experience is marred by what appears to be the lack of even basic editing; as though the author submitted a rough draft to the publisher who printed off copies without even a cursory copy-editing review. Missing quotation marks, missing or extraneous line breaks, printed carriage-return characters, poor print quality, and duplication of material in various chapters make reading the book like hitting a speedbump at 50 miles an hour.

An exciting story on the origin of NTThe author tries not to lose into too technical details, so it is a nice read for a generic reader, too... I doubt a generic reader can find it interesting, though

Now I know how Windows ended up the way it is.

Interesting but old school

Very interesting read, but would have maybe preferred some more technical details.

La storia di Windows NT non ha certo lo stesso fascino di quella di Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, ma in difetto di una storia di Microsoft, di una storia del PC IBM o di una storia di MS-DOS / Windows, è meglio di niente. La storia è raccontata in modo avvincente come un romanzo, e scorre bene, almeno fino a due terzi, quando si impantana in una noiosa cronaca del debug. Non è la storia tecnica di NT, ma degli uomini che ci hanno lavorato; praticamente di ogni nome citato, l’autore si fa punto d’onore di descrivere il peso, l’altezza, il colore dei capelli e spesso la forma del naso, oltre al curriculum studi. Tecnicamente è invece troppo povero: ci sono più informazioni tecniche su Windows NT sulla pagina wikipedia che in tutto il libro. In più il libro termina bruscamente alla data della pubblicazione di Windows NT (non specifica neppure che il numero di versione era la 3.1), ignorando l’accoglienza sul mercato e l’importanza successiva del sistema come kernel dell’attuale Windows, unico sistema operativo non Unix-like. Insomma, meglio di niente, ma non abbastanza.