Show Stopper! Quotes

“If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn’t work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjustment to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.” The”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“There are invariably many ways to achieve roughly the same technical ends. Technical choices are often highly personal. While shaped by commercial considerations, technical decisions also reflect human values and psychology. Cutler”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“If you don’t measure the performance, you’re just guessing, and if you’re guessing, you’re not very likely to write top-notch code.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Code writers, like engineers generally, tend to get sidetracked by interesting but irrelevant conundrums.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“The great advantage of digital media is that it can be stored, retrieved and massaged by a computer—at lightning speed and with unerring accuracy.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Code writers and engineers often maintain the fiction that their own psychology has little bearing on their work. Reason rules.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“It was now the age of visualization, when abstract concepts as well as basic needs and wants were increasingly expressed in visual terms. From its origins as a number cruncher, the computer had gone Hollywood; it was now an image maker of vast power. Thus, graphics in many ways defined the look and feel of computing. Cutler”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“No matter how good a jockey, he can’t turn a plow horse into a thoroughbred. It was the same with chips and software. Indeed, an operating system depended on a reliable chip.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“But Unix had a serious shortcoming: No common version existed. Over the years different versions of Unix had proliferated like weeds, so that an application written for one would not run unmodified on another. While DOS presented a single target to consumers, applications writers and computer makers, Unix did not.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Fans of mainframe computers boasted of the benefits of handling many jobs in large batches. But the mainframe was as efficient as mass transit—wonderful as long as everyone wanted to travel to the same place at the same time. The PC was like an automobile; it would go anywhere its driver wanted. Instead of organizing work around the mainframe’s schedule, a person with a PC could do computing anytime. The”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“The harbinger of a revolution, the Altair was the first mass-marketed personal computer. For the first time a computer was dedicated not just to a single task but to one person. The old guard of computing entirely missed the significance of this.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“NT is alarmingly complex. Consisting of six million lines of code, the program is among humanity’s most intricate handiworks. “No one mind can comprehend it all,” Cutler says. A”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Code writing was a solitary pursuit, but designing and fitting together diverse pieces demanded cooperation and compromise.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“The practice of writing code in C++ continually upset Cutler because it created so much confusion and inefficiency.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Even his own wife, Cindy, balked when learning of his actions. "I've heard how he is at work, and I wouldn't want to be around that," she said. "If he treated me that way, or the kids, we wouldn't be married.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“People rarely achieved greatness because they were too blinded by daily routine even to try anything extraordinary. For Cutler mediocrity was a failure of will, not talent.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“We aren’t going to sell a copy. Nope, if we don’t add this feature, the whole product is fucked. Absolutely fucked.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Gates had a notion that only solid code writers should manage and all managers of code writers should keep writing code.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Work, however, was an antidote for worry.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“The best testers were masters at deducing the chain of events leading to a failure. They provided code writers with a virtual road map to fix their bug.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“The ability to carry into the future thousands of applications from the past placed NT in a class of its own in the brief history of personal computing. But the Windows personality enabled NT to keep one foot in the past. This was the great departure. Computer makers previously had forced customers to adopt an abandon-ship attitude to their past applications software. To achieve a higher level of performance, customers were asked to leave everything behind (they could still use their old software if they were willing to essentially sacrifice the innovations in their new ship). Microsoft itself had essentially made this pitch when it initially introduced OS/2 in 1987. The failure of OS/2 left a deep impression on Gates; it gave him a better sense of the shock of the new, of just how much innovation the mass of PC owners could accept at once. Customers wanted to carry the past into the future, so NT must support old applications. Achieving”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Even seasoned code writers could not dismiss the possibility of being trapped in something akin to an infinite loop, wherein fixes spawned their own bugs. It had happened to others. The history of software was littered with projects, large and small, that had been abandoned in disgust, destroying careers.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Bugs were the backdrop of the code writer’s life. A comma in the wrong place. An “if” where there should be a “then.” An erroneous call from one piece of the program to another. Each could instantly cause a seizure, the collapse of a finely wrought abstraction into a puddle of ones and zeroes. Only human, software was born to fail. If not catastrophically, then aesthetically. Every software captain knew this.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“The imminent arrival of NT had turned the computer industry on its ear. After outsiders took stock of the first beta, expectations for NT grew. While easy to nitpick over flaws, some heralded the program as a grand achievement likely to alter the destinies of scores of computer and software companies. Those rivals most at risk—IBM, Sun Microsystems and Novell, to name the three biggest—girded themselves against the onslaught. First Boston, a securities firm that advised investors on the industry’s outlook, captured the mood on February 15, 1993, calling NT the “most aggressive new piece of software ever.” Eight”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“The Federal Trade Commission, a U.S. regulatory agency, was investigating Microsoft for possible violations of laws aimed at limiting abusive monopolies. This pained Gates, who felt he was simply a victim of his great success. “I don’t think the rich get much credit for anything,” he said. His own experience, he felt, bore this out. Just a few years earlier, he had been celebrated as the scrappy entrepreneur who courageously carved a thriving business from the technological wilderness ignored by entrenched powers. Now he was a maligned bully who wanted to own the entire software universe; a greedy man who thumbed his nose at both customers and competitors. Which”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Jobs had tried to hire Rashid, then a computer science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, but Rashid turned him down. He was reluctant to join the hurly-burly life of a corporation. His Mach research had been almost wholly funded by government grants; an agency of the Pentagon, his principal backer, saw Mach as crucial to unleashing the vast power of multiprocessor computers, inherently cheap machines that would someday replace pricey supercomputers as the backbone of the nation’s military and intelligence-gathering networks. Besides, Rashid was an academic purist. He seemed sincerely devoted to pursuing knowledge about software for its own sake. This was rare, even among academics, because software was such a remunerative field that the brightest researchers found themselves inexorably pulled into commerce: The money was too good. After”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Most code writers were like gifted athletes; they learned by doing and could not explain their actions. They just did it. This method, while fine for getting started, often hampered efforts at making code faster, which required unblinking self-analysis. “The secret to optimizing speed” he said, “is to ask yourself, ‘What does this code actually need to do? What’s the least work I can do to solve this problem?’ ” All”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Cairo’s approach was risky; it perhaps called for too large a leap by forcing individuals to greatly change their way of using PCs. Instead of working with several familiar applications, a Cairo customer would deal directly with data. Gates called this having “information at your fingertips.” Though it was an untested concept, Gates was as passionate about it as he was about putting NT on many different types of computers. But unlike NT, which was nearly done, Cairo seemed closer to science fiction. At”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“Poor performance was a common failing of most new programs. The annals of software amply showed this; nearly every landmark system, from IBM’s 360 to the various flavors of Unix to Microsoft’s Windows, was released in an immature state and evolved over time to win broader acceptance. Indeed, people expected the first commercial release of a new program to contain flaws of all sorts.”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

“In most projects, the first system built is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three.” Cutler”
― G. Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft