Showstopper!

“Reissued for a new era, Showstopper secures its place beside Hackers and The Soul of a New Machine as a defining chronicle of how technology is made–and the people who make it. With a reporter’s eye and a storyteller’s touch, G. Pascal Zachary traces the tumultuous creation of Windows NT, capturing not only the technical ambition but the human drama at its core. By illuminating the passions, conflicts, and relentless drive of Dave Cutler’s team, Zachary offers a rare window into a crucible where modern computing was forged. For anyone interested in how innovation really happens, Showstopper remains essential reading.”— John Markoff, former New York Times reporter and author of Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
“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, Artifical Life and Insanely Great
“Gripping … Zachary has a great eye for detail and the clear prose style needed to explain the arcana of high tech.” — Alan Deutschman, author of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, in Fortune
“I remain very enthusiastic about Showstopper, which is better than Soul of a New Machine. Zachary’s unique book richly deserves a new edition.”— David Warsh, former economics columnist for the Boston Glove and author of Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations
“Showstopper lives up to its title. It is an aeriobic 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
“Windows NT was one of the most important pieces of software ever written for the personal computer. When Microsoft introduced Windows NT in 1993, historians took little note of it– we thought it was just another incremental product. Now, decades later, we realize that Windows NT, along with the Intel Pentium processor introduced at the same time, transformed the place of the personal computer in the computing world. G. Pascal Zachary takes us inside the wall of Microsoft to observe the drama and creativity that brought this piece of code to life.”— Paul Ceruzzi, author of A New History of Modern Computing (with Thomas Haigh)

G. Pascal Zachary is a journalist, historian, and specialist in the structure and logic of technological change. Zachary covered Microsoft and Silicon Valley in the 1990s for The Wall Street Journal. He later wrote the “Ping” column on innovation for The New York Times. His essays and reportage on technology have appeared in Wired, Technology Review, Spectrum magazine, The San Jose Mercury, and many other publications. Zachary is also the author of Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (1997) and the editor of The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush (2022).

Zachary has taught technology journalism at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. At Arizona State University, he taught courses on the history of nuclear weapons and the history of consciousness, from the Greeks to Google. His research on digital innovation in sub-Saharan Africa was supported by the Gates foundation and the National Science Foundation. For the PBS network, he co-wrote Code Rush, with director David Winton, about the rise and fall of Netscape.

Zachary lives in northern California with his wife, Constance Okon. He chronicled their early adventures together in his memoir, Married to Africa: a love story.

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