RIP Fred “Mythical Man-Month” Brooks

“The Mythical Man-Month” was a classic book on the nature of computer programming, written by Fred Brooks after (among other things) his experience heading up the OS/360 project back in the 1960s. The man himself has now passed away at the age of 91 <https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/28/fred_mythical_man_month_brooks/>. OS/360 was the most ambitious of several operating systems developed by IBM for its System/360 line of computers. It provided conclusive proof that, if a project was running late, adding more people to work on it could actually make things worse. I have a copy of the 25th-Anniversary edition of the book, which includes his “No Silver Bullet” essay and also a detailed retrospective on how the original text stood up (or not) to the state of the programming art in the 1990s.
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro