I actually just read Show Stopper recently. The author is very non-technical and can't really explain the engineering details behind what he's writing about, b

I actually just read Show Stopper recently. The author is very non-technical and can't really explain the engineering details behind what he's writing about, but if you know something about basic OS design and concepts, that's ok. And the human stories - the stories behind the developers working on the project - are fascinating. Reading the book and learning the story behind NT's development, it's just amazing that such a good OS came out of that process - they released years after their initial projections and were rushed the whole time. But of course the really good parts of NT - the kernel, the object manager, the pager, async IO, the threading model - were things Cutler and his cohorts had been working on for years, first with VMS, then with PRISM, and then finally in NT. They had YEARS to ruminate about those things before they ever arrived at Microsoft. The bits of NT that aren't so well-regarded - the registry, NTFS, the graphical shell, csrss.exe and the 'microkernel' design - were completely new and developed in much less time and with less practical experience behind them than they really deserved.