Name Fred Brooks Role Software Engineer | Doctoral advisor Howard H. Aiken Awards Turing Award | |
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Born Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.
April 19, 1931 (age 93)
Durham, North Carolina ( 1931-04-19 ) Institutions IBM
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 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 Known for OS/360
The Mythical Man-Month Notable awards IEEE John von Neumann Medal (1993)
Turing Award (1999)
Computer History Museum Fellow (2001)
Turing Lecture (2005) Education Harvard University (1956), Duke University (1953) Fields Computer Science, Operating system, Software engineering Books The Mythical Man‑Month, The Design of Design: Essays fr, Computer Architecture: Concepts, The Mythical Man‑Mon, Automatic Data Processing Similar People Steve McConnell, Kenneth E Iverson, Gerrit Blaauw, Barry Boehm, Howard H Aiken | ||
7 minutes, 26 seconds, and the Fundamental Theorem of Agile Software Development
Frederick Phillips "Fred" 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. Brooks has received many awards, including the National Medal of Technology in 1985 and the Turing Award in 1999.
Contents
- 7 minutes 26 seconds and the Fundamental Theorem of Agile Software Development
- Interview with dr fred brooks excerpt oct 31 2011
- Education
- Career and research
- Service and memberships
- Awards and honors
- Personal life
- References
Interview with dr fred brooks excerpt oct 31 2011
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.
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 the development of the IBM 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 and scientific visualization.
In a 2010 interview by Kevin Kelly for an article 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.
As well as The Mythical Man-Month Brooks has authored or co-authored many books and peer reviewed papers including Automatic Data Processing, No Silver Bullet, Computer Architecture, and The Design of Design.
His contributions to Human–computer interaction are described in Ben Shneiderman's HCI pioneers website.
Service and memberships
Brooks has served on a number of US national boards and committees.
Awards and honors
In chronological order:
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.