Show-Stopper! The Breakneck Race to create Windows NT and the next Generation at Microsoft – Buch gebraucht kaufen

0029356717

(ISBN-13: 9780029356715)

leichte Gebrauchsspuren

312

613 g

Hardcover/gebunden

Englisch

Zustand siehe Bild/Bilder. Zusätzlich: Ecken und Kanten kaum bestoßen. Seiten und Buchschnitt kaum abgedunkelt. Dritte Seite Namenseintrag. Schutzumschlag fleckig, siehe Bild.

Praise for SHOWSTOPPER!

"SHOWSTOPPER! is one of the best works of reportage and storytelling that the computer revolution has yet inspired. G. Pascal Zachary accomplishes something difficult and rare: he has made a highly complicated process seem clear, vivid, and dramatic, without over-simplifying what is going on. Anyone interested in or affected by computers will enjoy this look at the creative agony that lies behind their magic!”
—JAMES FALLOWS, author of Looking at the Sun

"Meet a machismo software designer, a Tamil code warrior and a gang of zealous bug smashers, all driven by a headstrong billionaire to create the computer program of the future. Here are the fights, the pressures and the celebrations as a cult of displaced software wizards builds tomorrow's operating system. Zachary brings The Soul of a New Machine into the 1990s with a zing!”
—CLIFF STOLL, author of The Cuckoo's Egg

“G. Pascal Zachary managed to get total access to the formerly unseen programming catacombs of Microsoft and has made the most of it with this riveting look inside one of the world's most fascinating corporations. Great reading for hackers and computer virgins alike”
—STEVEN LEVY, author of Hackers, Artificial Life, and Insanely Great

"SHOWSTOPPER! lives up to its title. It is an aerobic recounting of an extraordinary business venture. More important, it offers profound lessons for all businesspersons pursuing large-scale, monstrously complex, industry-shaping innovations.”
—TOM PETERS, author of In Search of Excellence

The phenomenal success of Bill Gates and his Microsoft Corporation hinges, above all, on an ability to look to the future. Not content with holding a bulging share of the market for software applications, nor with dominating the crucial operating systems business by virtue of its DOS and Windows programs, Microsoft is always looking to the future.
And the future for Microsoft now goes by the name of Windows NT. A software innovation of the first order, NT could redefine the standards for computing throughout the world, into the next century. NT endows inexpensive personal computers with the capabilities of giant mainframes—yet without sacrificing the inherent flexibility and appeal of PCs.
SHOWSTOPPER! is the inside story of this stunning breakthrough in computer technology. Stripping away myth after myth, this unprecedented tale lays bare the messy, wrenching reality of winning innovations. To date, America has dominated the global software industry through creating cutting-edge code and by depending on both the ingenuity of a few visionaries and the coordination of huge, costly teams of programmers and testers. Gates-a managerial genius as well as a technical visionary—promotes an atmosphere of controlled chaos at Microsoft, and the story of Windows NT perfectly reflects this ethos. The brainchild of David Cutler, a legendary programmer recruited by Gates in 1988, NT took five years and $I50 million to complete. For much of that time, the massive program demanded the obsessive attention of more than 200 testers, writers and technicians.
Focusing on Cutlers mercurial ability to inspire and lash his team, SHOWSTOPPER! brilliantly portrays the human drama of this mammoth undertaking, exposing the pressures, disappointments and ultimate triumph that emerge from a cauldron of constant deadlines, competition with peers and a perpetual war against the inevitable and ubiquitous bugs in the program-among them the potentially lethal "showstopper.”
Gripping, vivid and accessible SHOWSTOPPER! reveals the outsize personalities that stand behind great advances: the mavericks, the organizers, the fixers, the motivators. Even as they wrestle with forces that threaten to tear them apart, Cutler and his team feverishly hunt for computing's Holy Grail.

G. PASCAL ZACHARY is an award-winning reporter for The Wall Street Journal and has written extensively about computers, software and the people who create them. Married with one son and one daughter, he lives in Berkeley, California.

1994

BN13337