Fred Brooks

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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.

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 Poughkeepsie 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 now-famous statement: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." This has since come to be known as "Brooks' law." In addition to The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks is known for No Silver Bullet, an essay on software engineering.

In 1965, Brooks left IBM to found the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chaired it for 20 years. As of 2004 he was still engaged in active research there, primarily in virtual worlds and molecular graphics. In January 2005 he gave the IEE/BCS annual Turing Lecture in London on the subject of "Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design".

He is also a confessional Christian who is active with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (source: [link])

Bibliography

(reprinted in the second edition of The Mythical Man-Month)

External links

[Fred Brooks' homepage]

Fred Brooks

Bibliography

External links

See also