Fred Brooks Explained

Fred Brooks
Birth Name:Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr.
Birth Date:April 19, 1931
Birth Place:Durham, North Carolina, U.S.
Death Place:Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S.
Thesis Title:The Analytic Design of Automatic Data Processing Systems
Thesis Url:http://search.proquest.com/docview/301934402
Thesis Year:1956
Workplaces:IBM[1]
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Duke University
Harvard University
Children:3
Doctoral Advisor:Howard H. Aiken
Doctoral Students:Andrew Glassner

Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. (April 19, 1931 – November 17, 2022) was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing development of IBM's System/360 family of mainframe computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about those experiences in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month.

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".[2]

Brooks received many awards, including the National Medal of Technology in 1985 and the Turing Award in 1999.[3]

Education

Born on April 19, 1931, in Durham, North Carolina,[4] he attended Duke University, graduating in 1953 with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics, and he received a Ph.D. in applied mathematics (computer science) from Harvard University in 1956, supervised by Howard Aiken.

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.[5] [6] [7]

Career and research

Brooks joined IBM in 1956, working in Poughkeepsie, New York, and Yorktown, New York. He worked on the architecture of the IBM 7030 Stretch, a $10 million scientific supercomputer of which nine were sold, and the IBM 7950 Harvest computer for the National Security Agency. Subsequently, he became manager for developing the IBM System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software package. During this time he coined the term "computer architecture".[4]

In 1964, Brooks accepted an invitation to come to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and founded the university's computer science department. He chaired it for 20 years. he was still engaged in active research there, mainly in virtual environments[8] and scientific visualization.[9]

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.[10] In addition to The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks is also known for the paper "No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering".[11] [12]

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-bit byte to an 8-bit byte, thereby enabling the use of lowercase letters. That change propagated everywhere."[13]

A "20th anniversary" edition of The Mythical Man-Month with four additional chapters was published in 1995.[14] [15]

As well as The Mythical Man-Month,[16] Brooks has authored or co-authored many books and peer reviewed papers including Automatic Data Processing,[17] "No Silver Bullet",[11] Computer Architecture,[18] and The Design of Design.[19]

His contributions to human–computer interaction are described in Ben Shneiderman's HCI pioneers website.[20]

Service and memberships

Brooks served on a number of US national boards and committees, including:[21]

Awards and honors

In chronological order:[21]

In January 2005, he gave the Turing Lecture on the subject of "Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design".[26] [27]

Personal life

Brooks was an evangelical Christian who was active with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.[28]

Brooks married Nancy Lee Greenwood in 1956. They have three children.[4] He named his first son after Kenneth E. Iverson.[29]

Brooks died on November 17, 2022, at age 91. He had been in poor health following a stroke.[30] [31] [32] [33]

Notes and References

  1. Brooks . F. P. . 1960 . The execute operations—a fourth mode of instruction sequencing . Communications of the ACM . 3 . 3 . 168–170 . 10.1145/367149.367168 . 37725430 . free.
  2. Web site: NAE Website – Dr. Frederick P. Brooks . National Academy of Engineering . May 21, 2021.
  3. Shustek . Len . Len Shustek . 2015 . An interview with Fred Brooks . Communications of the ACM . 58 . 11 . 36–40 . 10.1145/2822519 . 0001-0782 . 44303152.
  4. Web site: Booch . Grady . Frederick Brooks - A.M. Turing Award Laureate . amturing.acm.org . . November 20, 2022 . 1999.
  5. Kenneth E. . Iverson . June 1954 . Graduate Instruction and Research . Proceedings of the First Conference on Training Personnel for the Computing Machine Field . April 9, 2016 . Arvid W. Jacobson.
  6. Kenneth E. . Iverson . December 1991 . A Personal View of APL . IBM Systems Journal . 30 . 582–593 . 10.1147/sj.304.0582 . April 9, 2016 . 4.
  7. Book: Makin' Numbers . 1999 . MIT Press . 978-0-262-03263-6 . I. Bernard . Cohen . I. Bernard Cohen . Gregory W. . Welch.
  8. Brooks . Frederick P. Jr. . 1999 . What's Real About Virtual Reality . https://web.archive.org/web/20000818152648/http://www.cs.unc.edu/~brooks/WhatsReal.pdf . 2000-08-18 . live . IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications . 19 . 6 . 16–27 . 10.1109/38.799723 . 3235380 . January 22, 2015.
  9. Web site: January 23, 2003 . IBM Archives – Frederick P. Brooks Jr. . IBM . August 6, 2010.
  10. McConnell . Steve . Steve McConnell . From the Editor: Brooks' Law Repealed . www.computer.org . 1999 . 16 . November/December 1999 . 6–8 . 10.1109/MS.1999.10032 . November 20, 2022 . IEEE Computer Society . https://web.archive.org/web/20221120155655/https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/1999/06/s6006/13rRUEgs2JV . November 20, 2022 . stevemcconnell.com . bot: unknown.
  11. Brooks . F. P. Jr. . 1987 . No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering . https://web.archive.org/web/20121004020418/http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~xswang/Research/Papers/SERelated/no-silver-bullet.pdf . 2012-10-04 . live . Computer . 20 . 4 . 10–19 . 10.1.1.117.315 . 10.1109/MC.1987.1663532 . 372277.
  12. Grier . David Alan . David Alan Grier (writer) . There Is Still No Silver Bullet . Computer . February 2021 . 54 . 2 . 60–62 . 10.1109/MC.2020.3042682 . 231992114 . 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.. free.
  13. Kelly . Kevin . Kevin Kelly (editor) . July 28, 2010 . Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything . Wired . April 8, 2019.
  14. Web site: Green . Bob . 1995–2004 . The Mythical Man-Month, A Book Review . Robelle Solutions Technology . August 6, 2010.
  15. Web site: Bartlett . Roscoe A. . Software Engineering Reading List . github.io . November 20, 2022 . en . 2008.
  16. Book: Brooks . Frederick P. . 1975 . The mythical man-month: essays on software engineering . Addison-Wesley . 978-0-201-00650-6 . Reading, Massachusetts . registration.
  17. Book: Iverson . Kenneth E. . Kenneth E. Iverson . Brooks . Frederick P. . Automatic data processing: System/360 edition . Wiley . 1969 . 978-0-471-10605-0 . New York.
  18. Book: Brooks . Frederick P. . Blaauw . Gerrit A. . Gerrit Blaauw . 1997 . Computer architecture: concepts and evolution . Addison-Wesley . 978-0-201-10557-5 . Boston.
  19. Book: Brooks . Frederick P. . 2010 . The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist . Addison-Wesley Professional . 978-0-201-36298-5 . Reading, Massachusetts.
  20. Web site: Shneiderman . Ben . Ben Shneiderman . Encounters with HCI Pioneers - A Personal Photo Journal . February 8, 2016 . Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Pioneers Project . en-US.
  21. Web site: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. . UNC Computer Science . April 19, 2007 . November 19, 2022 . https://archive.today/20210828091748/http://www.cs.unc.edu/~brooks/ . August 28, 2021 . live.
  22. Web site: F.P. Brooks . July 17, 2015 . Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences . July 21, 2015 . https://web.archive.org/web/20150721042855/https://www.knaw.nl/en/members/foreign-members/3952 . dead.
  23. Web site: Fred Brooks ACM awards. acm.org.
  24. Brooks . Frederick P. . 1996 . The computer scientist as toolsmith II . Communications of the ACM . Association for Computing Machinery . 39 . 3 . 61–68 . 0001-0782 . 10.1145/227234.227243 . 34572148 . “The scientist builds in order to study; the engineer studies in order to build” . free.
  25. Web site: March 30, 2015 . Frederick P. Brooks – CHM Fellow Award Winner . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20150403184039/http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/Frederick,Brooks/ . April 3, 2015 . March 30, 2015 . Computerhistory.org.
  26. Web site: Turing Lecture – IET Conferences . . November 20, 2022 . https://web.archive.org/web/20150906071606/http://conferences.theiet.org/turing/speaker/previous/index.cfm . September 6, 2015 . web.archive.org . 2015 . 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.
  27. Web site: Brooks . Frederick P. . 7th Annual Turing Lecture: Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design . tv.theiet.org . Institution of Engineering and Technology . November 20, 2022 . video . January 20, 2005.
  28. http://cs.unc.edu/people/frederick-p-brooks-jr/ Faculty Biography
  29. Brooks . Frederick P. . August 2006 . The Language, the Mind, and the Man . Vector . 22 . March 16, 2018 . 3.
  30. News: Lohr . Steve . November 23, 2022 . Frederick P. Brooks Jr., Computer Design Innovator, Dies at 91 . November 24, 2022 . The New York Times.
  31. News: Grüner . Sebastian . November 18, 2022 . 8-Bit-Byte-Erfinder Fred Brooks gestorben . November 18, 2022 . . de.
  32. News: Remembering Department Founder Dr. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. . UNC Computer Science . November 18, 2022 . November 19, 2022 . https://archive.today/20221119100810/https://cs.unc.edu/news-article/remembering-department-founder-dr-frederick-p-brooks-jr/ . November 19, 2022 . live.
  33. News: Frederick P. Brooks Jr., 1931–2022 . November 20, 2022 . . November 20, 2022 . Legacy.com.

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