Episode Details

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

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