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

This “inside account captures the energy—and the madness—of the software giant’s race to develop a critical new program. . . . Gripping” (Fortune Magazine).

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 Microsoft 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.

G. Pascal Zachary is a journalist, author, and teacher. He spent thirteen years as a senior writer for the Wall Street Journal (1989 to 2001) and writes regularly for newspapers, magazines, and journals, including Salon, Foreign Policy, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wilson Quarterly, Fortune, and AlterNet. Zachary concentrates on African affairs. He also writes on globalization, America’s role in world affairs, immigration, race and identity, and the dysfunctionalities and divisions in US society.
 Zachary teaches journalism at Stanford University. He has lectured on various campuses, including those of MIT, Caltech, Puget Sound, UC Berkeley, Connecticut, and Tufts. He is a fellow at the Institute for Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and a senior associate at the Nautilus Institute in San Francisco. Currently, he is writing a book on the political economy of sub-Saharan Africa and a memoir of his marriage to an African, the Igbo hair braider Chizo Okon. They live with their children in the San Francisco Bay Area. His personal website is www.gpascalzachary.com and he blogs at www.africaworksgpz.com.