[ale] RIP: Fred Brooks: IBM 360 head of architecture

[Bob Toxen]

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Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2022 12:03:24 -0500 (EST)
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In Memoriam: Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
CircleID (11/19/22) Steven Bellovin

Computer scientist Frederick P. Brooks Jr., who passed away on Nov. 17,
earned the ACM A.M. Turing Award [called the Nobel Prize of Computer
Science] in 1999 for his landmark contributions to computer architecture,
operating systems, and software engineering. Columbia University's Steven
Bellovin recalled Brooks' time at IBM, where he led the design of the
S/360 mainframes, which comprised five models with distinct performance
characteristics, sharing a common architecture-defined instruction set.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brooks focused on
computer graphics and protein modeling, and pioneered virtual reality by
using a remote manipulator arm to "grab" and move atoms with accompanying
force feedback.

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Brooks' book "the mythical man-month: Essays on Software Engineering",
required for Jim Joyce's JCL class at Berkeley, was very valuable for
me with insight on complexity of programming teams.

I remember especially his lesson that adding people will not always speed
up the process due to training needs, etc.  His brilliant analogy was that
"Nine women cannot make a baby in one month" has not been forgotten.

Also, the first computer I programmed on (in APL) was the mighty IBM 360
model 90 that also was, I believe, the first with moving head disk drives.

RIP

Bob