Showstopper Review – lessons from building NT

Should add "(2004)".

An interesting book, because it both supports and contradicts the usual narrative about NT.

The contradictions are more interesting. Networking according to this book was something of a second thought. That was somewhat apparent in NT 3, where TCP/IP sockets were kind of second class. This has since been remedied.

NTFS is a bit more problematic. It's pretty clearly a descendant of DEC's ODS-11 filesystem, but "Showstopper!" doesn't mention that, and hardly anyone else does either.

Early NT (at least) also owed a huge debt to both Unix and Mach, but "Showstopper!" doesn't mention this either, in favor of an immaculate conception.