PERSON
Frederick Brooks
American computer scientist and architect (1931–2022) — manager of IBM's System/360 and OS/360 projects, founder of UNC Chapel Hill's computer science department, and author of the field's most influential book on software engineering.
Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. was born in Durham, North Carolina, in 1931, received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard in 1956, and joined IBM the same year. He led the architectural design of the System/360 family of computers — one of the most consequential hardware platforms in computing history — and then took responsibility for OS/360, the operating system whose painful development taught him what became The Mythical Man-Month. He left IBM in 1964 to found the computer science department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which he chaired for two decades and where he remained on the faculty until his retirement. He received the National Medal of Technology in 1985, the Turing Award in 1999, and honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He died on November 17, 2022 — days before the public launch of ChatGPT.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Brooks's legacy is unusual in computing for its breadth. He made