Fred Brooks
| Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | April 19, 1931 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
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| Known for | OS/360 The Mythical Man-Month[5] |
| Notable awards | IEEE John von Neumann Medal (1993) Turing Award (1999) Computer History Museum Fellow (2001) |
| Website www |
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Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. (born April 19, 1931) is a 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]
Contents
Education[edit]
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[edit]
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 the 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 1965, 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[update] he was still engaged in active research there, primarily in virtual environments[7] and scientific visualization.[8]
In a 2010 interview by Kevin Kelly for an article[9] 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.[10]
In January 2005 he gave the IEE/BCS annual Turing Lecture in London on the subject of "Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design". In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
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,[11] No Silver Bullet,[12] Computer Architecture,[13] and The Design of Design.[14]
Personal life[edit]
Brooks is an evangelical Christian who is active with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.[15]
Service and memberships[edit]
He 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[edit]
In chronological order:[16]
- Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (1968)
- McDowell Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Computer Art, IEEE Computer Group (1970)
- Computer Sciences Distinguished Information Services Award, Information Technology Professionals (1970)
- Guggenheim Fellowship for studies on computer architecture and human factors of computer systems, Cambridge University, England (1975)
- Member, National Academy of Engineering (1976)
- Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1976)
- Computer Pioneer Award, IEEE Computer Society (1982)
- National Medal of Technology and Innovation (1985)
- Thomas Jefferson Award, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1986)
- Distinguished Service Award, Association for Computing Machinery (1987)
- Harry Goode Memorial Award, American Federation of Information Processing Societies (1989)
- Foreign Member, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991)
- Honorary Doctor of Technical Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich (1991)
- John von Neumann Medal, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (1993)
- Fellow (initial inductee), Association for Computing Machinery (1994)
- Distinguished Fellow, British Computer Society (1994)
- Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering, UK (1994)
- Allen Newell Award, Association for Computing Machinery (1994)
- Bower Award and Prize in Science, Franklin Institute (1995)
- CyberEdge Journal Annual Sutherland Award (April 1997)
- A. M. Turing Award, Association for Computing Machinery (1999)
- Member, National Academy of Science (2001)
- Fellow Award, Computer History Museum (2001)
- Eckert-Mauchly Award, Association for Computing Machinery and The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers–Computer Society (2004)
- IEEE Virtual Reality Career Award (2010)
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Brooks, F. P. (1960). "The execute operations---a fourth mode of instruction sequencing". Communications of the ACM 3 (3): 168. doi:10.1145/367149.367168.
- ^ a b c Fred Brooks at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ "Doctoral Dissertations — Department of Computer Science". Retrieved 7 January 2014.
- ^ "Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. - PhD Students". Computer Science Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved 23 October 2013.
- ^ a b c Brooks, Frederick P. (1975). The mythical man-month: essays on software engineering. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. ISBN 0-201-00650-2.
- ^ a b List of publications from the DBLP Bibliography Server
- ^ Brooks, Jr., Frederick P. (1999). "What's Real About Virtual Reality". Computer Graphics & Applications (IEEE) 19 (6): 16–27. Retrieved 22 January 2015.
- ^ "IBM Archives - Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.". IBM. Retrieved 6 August 2010.
- ^ Kelly, Kevin (July 28, 2010). "Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything". Wired. Retrieved 10 February 2011.
- ^ "The Mythical Man-Month, A Book Review". Retrieved 6 August 2010.
- ^ Iverson, Kenneth E.; Brooks, Frederick P. (1969). Automatic data processing: System/360 edition. New York: Wiley. ISBN 0-471-10605-4.
- ^ Brooks, F. P. , J. (1987). "No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering". Computer 20 (4): 10. doi:10.1109/MC.1987.1663532.
- ^ Brooks, Frederick P.; Blaauw, Gerrit A. (1997). Computer architecture: concepts and evolution. Boston: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-10557-8.
- ^ Brooks, Frederick P. (2010). The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Professional. ISBN 0-201-36298-8.
- ^ Faculty Biography at UNC.
- ^ a b Home Page, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
External links[edit]
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fred Brooks. |
Quotations related to Fred Brooks at Wikiquote
Quotations related to
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- 1931 births
- American computer scientists
- 20th-century American mathematicians
- 21st-century American mathematicians
- American technology writers
- Duke University alumni
- Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
- Fellows of the British Computer Society
- Harvard University alumni
- IBM employees
- Living people
- Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
- National Medal of Technology recipients
- People from Durham, North Carolina
- American software engineers
- Turing Award laureates
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty
- Virtual reality pioneers
- Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
- Guggenheim Fellows
