{"id":19330,"date":"2022-11-28T16:54:48","date_gmt":"2022-11-28T16:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/11\/28\/rip-fred-mythical-man-month-brooks-the-register\/"},"modified":"2022-11-28T16:54:48","modified_gmt":"2022-11-28T16:54:48","slug":"rip-fred-mythical-man-month-brooks-the-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/11\/28\/rip-fred-mythical-man-month-brooks-the-register\/","title":{"rendered":"RIP Fred ‘Mythical Man Month’ Brooks \u2022 The Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Obit<\/span> Dr Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr, leader of IBM’s OS\/360 project and the man chiefly responsible for the prevalence of the eight-bit byte, has died at the age of 91.<\/p>\n

Fred Brooks<\/a> was the project lead for OS\/360, IBM’s flagship OS for its vastly influential S\/360 line of computers<\/a>. His experience on this project led him to write probably the most famous book about project management, The Mythical Man-Month<\/em>. From that book came several famous dictums about computing. Some notable examples include:<\/p>\n

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“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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“The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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“All programmers are optimists.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There are quite<\/a> a few<\/a> pages of Fred Brooks quotations<\/a>, with good reason \u2013 you will probably recognize several of them. For instance, he originated<\/a> (PDF) the use of the word “architecture” to describe computer design, as well as coining the phrase “second-system effect”.<\/p>\n

In 1999, he won the Turing award for “landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering.”<\/p>\n

In 2010, WIRED magazine asked<\/a> him what he felt was his greatest technological achievement. His response was:<\/p>\n

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The most important single decision I ever made was to change the IBM 360 series from a 6-bit byte to an 8-bit byte, thereby enabling the use of lowercase letters. That change propagated everywhere.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As the Reg<\/em> has noted before, though, the software industry as a whole has failed to learn what Brooks found and taught<\/a>.<\/p>\n

IBM hired Brooks to direct the OS\/360 project because it was running late, although his previous project, the IBM 8000, had failed. Brooks attempted to resign, but this was rebuffed by IBM CEO Thomas J Watson Jr, who said:<\/p>\n

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I just spent a billion dollars educating you; I’m not letting you go now!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Under Brooks’ direction, OS\/360 did finally ship. It changed the direction of the computer industry, introducing the idea of software compatibility across different hardware models. The S\/360 range were also the machines on and for which the hypervisor was invented<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Brooks then quit IBM to found the Faculty of Computer Science<\/a> at the University of North Carolina<\/a>. After writing The Mythical Man-Month<\/em><\/a> (PDF), he went on to write and co-author multiple other books including The Design of Design<\/em><\/a> and papers including No Silver Bullet \u2014 Essence and Accident in Software Engineering<\/em><\/a> (PDF).<\/p>\n

He has been called<\/a> “a giant of computer science”, a sentiment echoed<\/a> by one of his students, Professor Steven Bellovin, the co-inventor of USENET and encrypted password exchange.<\/p>\n

As his family’s obituary<\/a> to him notes, he was a committed evangelical Christian. He suffered a stroke in 2020, after which his health declined. He leaves his wife of 66 years Nancy, three children, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. \u00ae<\/p>\n

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