Building Windows NT: Dave Cutler and the Kernel That Changed Microsoft
How a DEC Refugee Team Created the Foundation of Modern Windows

About this book:

Before Windows dominated the enterprise, before the cloud, before the modern PC was reliable enough to run a bank or a hospital, there was a coup. In 1988, Digital Equipment Corporation canceled the PRISM project—Dave Cutler’s masterpiece 64-bit RISC architecture and its revolutionary Mica operating system—and in a fit of corporate blindness, drove the greatest living systems architect into the arms of a brash, 16-bit software company across the country. *Building Windows NT* tells the inside story of how Microsoft bought a clean sheet of paper and a band of battle-hardened DEC refugees, then locked them in Building 2 with an ultimatum: build an industrial-strength kernel from scratch, or die trying.

What followed was five years of engineering warfare. Cutler imposed a tyranny of rigor on Microsoft’s chaotic culture—inventing the Hardware Abstraction Layer, a preemptive microkernel architecture, and the transactional NTFS file system—while surviving a brutal pivot from OS/2 to Win32, a mutiny with IBM, and the infamous "dogfooding" mandate that forced developers to run their daily work on crashing pre-alpha code. Through exhaustive research and technical narrative, this book reveals how Lou Perazzoli cracked virtual memory, how Gary Kimura built a file system that wouldn't lose data, and how Cutler’s volcanic personality forged a team that shipped Windows NT 3.1 on time and with zero known bugs.

The result was not just a product launch; it was a structural mutation of the industry. The kernel hammered out in Building 2 absorbed the consumer Windows line, crushed UNIX in the datacenter, and today powers every Azure instance, every Xbox, and every Windows 11 machine on the planet. *Building Windows NT* is the definitive account of the outsiders who tore up the blueprint, bet everything on portability and discipline, and built the indestructible engine that still runs the modern world.