Review of 'Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
It's been many years, but it gave me a lot of insight into how Windows NT, the ancestor of today's Windows was made and why. Microsoft took over a decade to merge the codebase for MS-DOS, through Windows 3.11, Win95, Win98, WinME, and it was all in an effort to get back to what Dave Cutler did in this book. They give a little bit of his background with DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, with VMS, which NT took a lot of inspiration from, I wish there was more about DEC here. What stuck with me was "Eating you own dogfood", a technique in which the OS was built using it's own code. Previously, almost all computers were coded in a much more powerful machine with a polished OS and tools. The Windows programmers had to hoist themselves by their own bootstraps. I think the work is rather neglected when considering …
It's been many years, but it gave me a lot of insight into how Windows NT, the ancestor of today's Windows was made and why. Microsoft took over a decade to merge the codebase for MS-DOS, through Windows 3.11, Win95, Win98, WinME, and it was all in an effort to get back to what Dave Cutler did in this book. They give a little bit of his background with DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, with VMS, which NT took a lot of inspiration from, I wish there was more about DEC here. What stuck with me was "Eating you own dogfood", a technique in which the OS was built using it's own code. Previously, almost all computers were coded in a much more powerful machine with a polished OS and tools. The Windows programmers had to hoist themselves by their own bootstraps. I think the work is rather neglected when considering it's importance to PCs today.
