Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. (April 19, 1931 – November 17, 2022) was an American computer architect, software engineer, and
computer scientist, best known for managing the development of
IBM's
System/360 family of computers and the
OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about those experiences in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month.[3]
In 1976, Brooks was elected to the
National Academy of Engineering for "contributions to computer system design and the development of academic programs in computer sciences".[4]
Brooks served as the graduate teaching assistant for
Ken Iverson at Harvard's graduate program in "automatic data processing", the first such program in the world.[8][9][10]
A few years after leaving IBM, he wrote The Mythical Man-Month. The seed for the book was planted by IBM's then-CEO
Thomas J. Watson Jr., who asked in Brooks's exit interview why it was so much harder to manage software projects than hardware projects. In this book, Brooks made the now-famous statement: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later", which has since come to be known as
Brooks's law.[13] In addition to The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks is also known for the paper
"No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering".[14][15]
In 2004 in a talk at the
Computer History Museum and also in a 2010 interview in
Wired magazine, Brooks was asked "What do you consider your greatest technological achievement?" Brooks responded, "The most important single decision I ever made was to change the IBM 360 series from a 6-
bitbyte to an 8-bit byte, thereby enabling the use of lowercase letters. That change propagated everywhere."[16]
A "20th anniversary" edition of The Mythical Man-Month with four additional chapters was published in 1995.[17][18]
Received the
Computer History Museum's Fellow Award, for his contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering.[27] (2001)
Eckert–Mauchly Award, Association for Computing Machinery and The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers–Computer Society (2004)
IEEE Virtual Reality Career Award (2010)
In January 2005, he gave the
Turing Lecture on the subject of "Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design".[28][29]
^Iverson, Kenneth E. (June 1954). Arvid W. Jacobson (ed.).
"Graduate Instruction and Research". Proceedings of the First Conference on Training Personnel for the Computing Machine Field. Retrieved April 9, 2016.
^Grier, David Alan (February 2021).
"There Is Still No Silver Bullet". Computer. 54 (2): 60–62.
doi:10.1109/MC.2020.3042682.
S2CID231992114. Retrieved November 20, 2022. No article has been so central to the discussion as "No Silver Bullet" by Frederick P. Brooks. Yet, almost 35 years after he wrote this contribution to knowledge, Brooks's observation remains true.
^Brooks, Frederick P. (2010). The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Professional.
ISBN978-0-201-36298-5.
^"Turing Lecture – IET Conferences".
Institution of Engineering and Technology. 2015. Archived from
the original(web.archive.org) on September 6, 2015. Retrieved November 20, 2022. 2005 – Professor Fred Brooks Jr, FREng Dist. FBCS Founding Kenan Professor of Computer Science University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design