Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. (born April 19, 1931) is a software engineer and computer scientist, best-known for managing the development of OS/360, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month. "It is a very humbling experience to make a multi-million-dollar mistake, but it is also very memorable." Brooks received a Turing Award in 1999 and many other awards.
Born in Durham, North Carolina, he attend...
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Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. (born April 19, 1931) is a software engineer and computer scientist, best-known for managing the development of OS/360, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month. "It is a very humbling experience to make a multi-million-dollar mistake, but it is also very memorable." Brooks received a Turing Award in 1999 and many other awards.
Born in Durham, North Carolina, he attended Duke University, graduating in 1953, and he received a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics (Computer Science) from Harvard University in 1956. Howard Aiken was his advisor.
Brooks joined IBM in 1956, working in Endicott and Yorktown, New York. He worked on the architecture of the Stretch (a $10m scientific supercomputer for the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) and Harvest computers and then was manager for the development of the System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software they ran.
It was in The Mythical Man-Month that Brooks made the...
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