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OS/360
The operating system for IBM's System/360 — one of the largest and most painful software projects of its era — whose failures taught Brooks what no textbook could, and became the empirical foundation of The Mythical Man-Month.
In 1964, IBM committed to an unprecedented project: a family of computers (the System/360) that would share a single operating system across a wide range of hardware. Frederick Brooks, thirty-three years old and confident in his competence, took responsibility for the OS/360 operating system. Hundreds of programmers. Years of effort. A budget that expanded with the quiet relentlessness of a gas filling its container. The project was late. It was over budget. It was painful in ways that would prove more instructive than any success could have been. Brooks spent the next decade distilling what had happened, and in 1975 published The Mythical Man-Month, whose lessons were drawn directly from OS/360's pathologies: the communication overhead that consumed productive capacity, the second-system effect that bloated the design, the conceptual fragmentation that produced inconsistent interfaces, the scheduling delusions that the arithmetic of the man-month concealed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
OS/360 was not a failure in the