Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. led some of the largest computing projects of the 1960s at IBM. He managed the development of the System/360 family of computers and then the OS/360 operating system, an effort that involved hundreds of programmers and became one of the first truly massive software undertakings.
The painful experience of OS/360 became the raw material for his 1975 book “The Mythical Man-Month,” a collection of essays on the management of large software projects. Its most famous claim, now called Brooks’s Law, is that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later, because of the communication and training overhead new people impose.
In 1986 Brooks wrote “No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accident in Software Engineering,” distributed as University of North Carolina technical report TR86-020. There he argued that no single technique or technology would deliver a tenfold gain in software productivity within a decade, because the hardest part of software is conceptual rather than incidental.
Brooks founded the computer science department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received the ACM A. M. Turing Award in 1999 for his contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering.