Fred Brooks, Jr., the manager of IBM's S/360 project, died yesterday at the age of 81. The S/360 line of computers revolutionized the computer business, providing models ranging from the small to the large, all capable of running the same software--and for that matter capable of running the software of a prior IBM line. The S/360 line also established (or helped to establish) the eight-bit byte as standard. Brooks summarized what he had learned from the project in The Mythical Man-Month. My copy of the 25th anniversary edition is by now 27 years old. (It is also lent out, which may be the case with many copies of such books.) And he wrote an influential, or at least frequently quoted, essay "No Silver Bullets" about the challenges of software production.
The Computer History Museum has an interesting interview of Brooks by Grady Booch.
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