The Showstopper Show

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: August 16th, 2021

The Showstopper Show

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for August 16th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on August 16th included special guests G. Pascal Zachary (see gpascalzachary.com), and Jessamyn West (see jessamyn.medium.com), as well as Dan Cross, Tom Lyon, Josh Clulow, and others. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• G. Pascal Zachary’s “Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft” book
• Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine” book
• [@0:46](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=46) “The endless debate of NT vs Unix.”
  • Bryan: My whole career was kind of defined by going where Windows wasn’t. I don’t know what I was expecting, but what I found was a real time capsule from software development in the 90’s.
• [@2:46](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=166) Jessamyn: There was some familial impact (from developing DG Eclipse) that wasn’t mentioned in the book.
  • “O, Engineers!” retrospective from wired
• [@6:30](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=390) What was Kidder’s process? “He lived in my house!”
• [@8:32](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=512) Zachary interviewed family members extensively. > People couldn’t leave, they were staying at the office all the time.
• [@14:23](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=863) I do feel this is a time capsule. A time before two mega-trends hit: the Internet and open source.
• [@17:33](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1053) Microsoft was kind of a joke software company in the early 90’s. > Dave Cutler was a force of nature.
• [@19:59](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1199) No one understood why someone was good at coding. It was a mystery to everyone, why there was such a wide stratification of coders. > There were projects that never saw the light of day.
  • Ashton-Tate, dBase > There was a sense from Cutler and Perazzoli, that leadership of the team, > that these guys at Microsoft really didn’t get how serious the process > of building this battleship was.
  • I think the level of anguish did surprise me.
• [@23:59](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1439)
  In “Soul of the New Machine,” the machine was the star, and people served it. East Coast vs West Coast attitudes. > On the West Coast, the personal computer were supposed to help you > actualize your counter-cultural values.
  • Ken Olsen of DEC > Computing is equivalent with IBM. There was no software industry > so long as IBM gave all the software away for free.
• [@26:09](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1569) Crashes. > Wozniak dreamed of owning > his own PDP > computer, which cost as much as a house. So he was aware of the robustness > of the minicomputer, and by contrast, the puny power of a personal computer.
  • Thirtysomething > Dave Cutler was not cuddly. He was menacing, he could lose his temper. > And I tried not to get to close to him physically for that reason. > There were two looming father figures in Cutler and Gates. > And I think it created a lot of anxiety.
• [@29:52](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1792) The stakes for NT at Microsoft were high.
  • Fred Brooks’ “The Mythical Man-Month” book > It was a watershed moment in the history of computing. > It was more like the last battleship, rather than the next frontier.
  • Bryan: I didn’t realize this, that Gates was arguing against memory protection with Cutler. From our perspective, shipping an operating system without memory protection, in an era when microprocessors supported it, is malpractice.
• [@33:14](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1994) Cutler’s vendetta against Unix. > Conflict was at the heart of innovation at Microsoft at that time.
  • Mitch Kapor of Lotus. > These early personal computer innovators were dismissed and sometimes > humiliated by mainstream big iron people of the 60’s and 70’s.
  • Bill Gates’ “The Road Ahead” book doesn’t mention the internet.
  • Zachary’s “Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century” book > Computers on the West Coast were seen as extensions of your creativity, > and a tool for liberation. And for a long time that dominated the horizons.
• In 2005 Gates and Ballmer don’t want to do cloud computing. “Who’s gonna want to put their stuff in the cloud?” We’ve found that computing is a collective experience.
• [@38:28](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=2308) Email and personal messaging
  • Sun Ray thin client computer
  • Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson’s “The UNIX time-sharing system” paper > Unix was an experiment in collaboration.
  • RSX-11 for the PDP-11. And VMS for the VAX. > The attitude of looking down on Unix (as undesigned, academic) is > carried forward by Microsofties today.
  • Tom: You can forgive Cutler’s misgivings, because Unix pretty much stole the thunder out of VMS.
• [@42:24](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=2544) Interviews for the book. Family members perspective on workplace behavior.
  • Betty Shanahan, Society of Women Engineers. Brief Q&A
  • EAGLE (Eclipse Appreciation and Gratitude for Lonely Evenings) award > Betty’s husband got an award for having to do his own laundry…
  • Jessamyn’s “Women in Early Tech” blog entry about Shanahan