Fred Brooks

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Fred Brooks
Fred Brooks.jpg
Born Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.
(1931-04-19) April 19, 1931 (age 93)
Durham, North Carolina
Fields Computer Science
Operating systems
Software engineering
Institutions IBM[1]
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Duke University
Harvard University
Alma mater Duke University (undergraduate)
Harvard University (postgraduate)
Thesis The Analytic Design of Automatic Data Processing Systems (1956)
Doctoral advisor Howard Aiken[2]
Doctoral students
List
  • Luv Kohli
    Jeremy Wendt
    Jason Jerald
    Eric Burns
    Sharif Razzaque
    Paul M. Zimmons
    Alexandra Bokinsky
    Ben Lok
    Brent Insko
    Michael Meehan
    Kevin Arthur
    Rui Bastos
    David Luebke
    Mark R. Mine
    Richard L. Holloway
    Jeffrey P. Hultquist
    Elton P. Amburn
    Russell M. Taylor II
    Amitabh Varshney
    Lawrence D. Bergman
    James Che-Ming Chung
    Penny L. Rheingans
    Mark C. Surles
    John M. Airey
    Ming Ouh-young
    Russell Tuck
    Mark C. Davis
    Andrew S. Glassner
    Thomas V. Williams
    James S. Lipscomb
    F. Donelson Smith
    Thomas H. Dunigan, Jr.
    Edward G. Britton
    Paul J. Kilpatrick
    Cheryl C. Sneeringer
    James W. Sneeringer IV
    Craig J. Mudge
    William V. Wright
    Jan S. Prokop
    Alfred Paul Oliver
    William Y. Stevens
    [3][4][2]
Known for OS/360
The Mythical Man-Month[5]
Notable awards <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/>
Website
www.cs.unc.edu/~brooks

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. (born April 19, 1931) is 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 the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month.[5] Brooks has received many awards, including the National Medal of Technology in 1985 and the Turing Award in 1999.[6][7]

Education

Born in Durham, North Carolina, 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.[2]

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 $10m scientific supercomputer of which nine were sold, and the IBM 7950 Harvest computer for the National Security Agency. Subsequently, he became manager for the development of the System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software package. During this time he coined the term computer architecture.

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's law. In addition to The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks is also known for the paper No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accident in Software Engineering.

In 1964, Brooks accepted an invitation to come to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and found the University's computer science department. He chaired it for 20 years. As of 2013 he was still engaged in active research there, primarily in virtual environments[8] and scientific visualization.[9]

In a 2010 interview by Kevin Kelly for an article[10] 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."

A "20th anniversary" edition of The Mythical Man-Month with four additional chapters was published in 1995.[11]

As well as The Mythical Man-Month[5] Brooks has authored or co-authored many books and peer reviewed papers[6] including Automatic Data Processing,[12] No Silver Bullet,[13] Computer Architecture,[14] and The Design of Design.[15]

Service and memberships

Brooks has served on a number of US national boards and committees.[16]

  • Defense Science Board (1983–86)
  • Member, Artificial Intelligence Task Force (1983–84)
  • Chairman, Military Software Task Force (1985–87)
  • Member, Computers in Simulation and Training Task Force (1986–87)
  • National Science Board (1987–1992)

Awards and honors

In chronological order:[16]

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In January 2005 he gave the Turing Lecture on the subject of "Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design". In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Personal life

Brooks is an evangelical Christian who is active with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.[19]

References

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  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 Fred Brooks at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
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  6. 6.0 6.1 Fred Brooks's publications indexed by the DBLP Bibliography Server at the University of Trier
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  16. 16.0 16.1 Home Page, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
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  19. Faculty Biography at UNC.


Quotations related to Fred Brooks at Wikiquote

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