Maybe it’s a true test of a book about the software industry to read it 11 years later. G. Paschal Zachary’s Showstopper! the breakneck race to create Windows NT and the next generation at Microsoft was published in 1994. The book strives to do for software development what Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine did for the personal computer (well, the minicomputer, just a few years before the personal computer). That’s not a bad target. This is a readable book, and while web development rarely achieves the complexity and time scale of client software, let alone operating systems, the themes of coalescing many people around delivering are universal… and not just in the hi-tech realm.
I started to pay closer attention to the software industry just as Windows NT was finally reaching the market. As the book documents, Windows NT was delayed and postponed many times. I was more familiar with the release of Chicago, which became Windows 95. I remember feeding many, many floppy disks into a machine to install an early beta of 95. Ouch. Since Showstopper talks about sending out CDs for some of its betas, I guess 95 was on floppies because it was aimed more at consumers. Anyway, Zachary’s history brought me back a decade and more quite easily.
The fascinating part of the book was the people. Not just that any compelling story is usually a human interest tale, but that the people in this book are names that still mean something in the industry today. The pivotal person is Dave Cutler (or Wikipedia entry). But beyond obvious folks (Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer), some of the names in Showstopper still play large roles in the tech world, whether at Microsoft or elsewhere. Examples include:
- Paul Maritz, who retired from Microsoft in 2000. As of 2002, he was an independent investory and director.
- Mark Lucovsky, who left Microsoft for Google in March 2005
- Probably lots of the others, whether I recognize their names now or not.
All of them are in this book from working on Windows NT sometime during the early 1990s. Makes for a great “where are they now?” follow-up, I would think.