Quotes from G. Pascal Zachary

People rarely achieved greatness because they were too blinded by daily routine even to try anything extraordinary. For Cutler mediocrity was a failure of will, not talent.

With software, you know what you have to do," he said, "but it's always a big surprise how long it will take." Miller

Indeed, Cutler had found a calling in life. "What I really wanted to do was work on computers, not apply them to problems.

Even his own wife, Cindy, balked when learning of his actions. "I've heard how he is at work, and I wouldn't want to be around that," she said. "If he treated me that way, or the kids, we wouldn't be married.

In a certain sense, choosing an operating system was similar to buying a car. Besides the purchase price, there was a cost of ownership. The size of an operating system largely determined the amount of memory required by the computer. Just as some cars guzzled gas, some operating systems consumed large amounts of memory.

Regarding both size and performance, customer preferences were clear. They wanted software that gave speedy results on inexpensive hardware and got great mileage out of memory.

Ballmer's practice of praising the unfinished program was standard procedure in the software industry, in which rivals promised so much, so soon, that one wag coined the term "vaporware" to describe such touted but incomplete programs as NT.

Programming "was just the most bizarre situation, because you're used to doing something and thinking you've done it right," he later said. "But it isn't right. You just don't notice it isn't right. On a computer there is no consolation in discovering you're almost right. Almost means you're still just wrong." Even

Technical disputes are the bane and boon of a lab. Yet engineering and invention often allow many ways to achieve the same result. Honest disagreements, then, are endemic in every technical enterprise. Some disputes, however, involve what programmers call "religious differences." The points at stake seem important only to zealots; a neutral party might say that both sides are right. But zealots—unable to silence their opponents with logical arguments—hurl insults. One

In the 1950s Univac made the best computers for data processing, but by the late 1960s the company was in decline. DuPont asked Cutler to improve the reliability of its aging Univac, which meant fiddling with the machine's operating system. Until then Cutler had never even thought about operating systems. But the company's computer experts seemed not to know much either, and he jumped in. Computer

They often felt flooded by possibilities, leaving Perazzoli thinking that the project ran "right on the edge of chaos." More control wasn't the answer, however. "It seems like a little dose of management is needed," he said. "Yet you can never give a little management. You always give too much. Its a very precarious position, undermanaging. Yet you have to be there to succeed." Cutler

He felt people at IBM worshiped hierarchies. Each employee worried about his little piece of turf and nothing else. Diamond still recalled with amazement the time an IBM programmer, hacking away at OS/2, watched the program crash to a halt. The guy studied his screen for a minute, then said, "Wow, what a nasty problem. Glad that isn't in my code." He restarted his PC and went back to work, never even reporting the bug. At

In 1951, Grace Murray Hopper, a mathematician with the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Ordnance Naval Reserve, conceived of a program called a compiler, which translated a programmer's instructions into the strings of ones and zeroes, or machine language, that ultimately controlled the computer. In principle, compilers seemed just the thing to free programmers from the tyranny of hardware and the mind-numbing binary code. Hopper

They arose very quickly, became a profession very rapidly, and were all too soon infected with a certain amount of resistance to change. The very programmers whom I have heard almost castigate a customer because he would not change his system of doing business are the same people who at times walk into my office and say, "But we have always done it this way." It is for this reason that I now have a counterclockwise clock hanging in my office. In