Showstopper!

Wall Street Journal reporter G. Pascal Zachary tells the inside story of how Microsoft built Windows NT. A hand-picked team of software engineers, driven by David Cutler, gave up nearly everything else in their lives to create a new, stable operating system meant to carry Microsoft's growth through the next decade. Drawing on interviews with the people who made it, Zachary follows the personalities, conflicts and corporate culture behind the project, the bugs that threatened it, and the pressure to deliver hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The book is often compared with Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine. It was published in 1994, a year after Microsoft introduced Windows NT.

Freelance software engineer Scott Johnson recommended it as one of several case studies of product development for anyone drawn to a career in high tech.