Frederick P. Brooks Jr., a prolific pc scientist and longtime professor of pc science, died on 17 November on the age of 91.
Whereas working as a venture supervisor at IBM within the Sixties, the IEEE Life Fellow led the event of the System/360 pc household. It was the primary vertically appropriate household of mainframe computer systems. Brooks additionally developed IBM’s OS/360, the world’s largest software program venture on the time. He’s credited with coining the time period pc structure, which is used to explain how {hardware} and software program are organized to make up a pc system and the operations which information its perform. He wrote The Legendary Man-Month, a ebook of essays revealed in 1975 that detailed classes he realized from challenges he confronted whereas creating the OS/360.
Brooks left IBM in 1964 to discovered the College of North Carolina’s pc science division in Chapel Hill.
Though he retired from educating in 2013, Brooks was nonetheless energetic within the college’s analysis program in digital environmentsand scientific visualization till 2020.
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Breakthroughs at IBM
After incomes a bachelor’s diploma in physics in 1953 from Duke College, in Durham, N.C., Brooks acquired a Ph.D. in utilized arithmetic in 1956 from Harvard. He accomplished his dissertation—the event of a pc that might do payrolls—beneath the supervision of pc pioneer Howard Aiken, who had designed IBM’s Harvard Mark I pc.
Brooks joined IBM in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1957. His first project was engaged on the IBM 7030. Referred to as Stretch, it was the primary transistorized supercomputer. Though commercially unsuccessful, Stretch impressed applied sciences utilized in innovations akin to instruction pipelining and reminiscence interleaving. Brooks additionally designed Harvest, IBM’s 7030 character-processing auxiliary processor.
His subsequent venture was the IBM 8000 collection of computer systems. In 1961 IBM deemed the venture a failure and terminated it.
That very same 12 months, Brooks was tasked with main the event of a household of general-purpose programs for each business and scientific purposes. Earlier than the discharge of IBM System/360, pc programs had been incompatible with one another, even when they had been developed by the identical producer. Software program and peripherals from outdated programs wouldn’t work with new ones, making it expensive for purchasers to improve their {hardware}, in keeping with an IBM article concerning the know-how.
The System/360, launched in 1964, contained six processor fashions with 40 peripherals. The road was named the 360 as a result of it addressed the wants of all forms of clients. Inside 5 years of its launch, greater than 3,000 items had been offered, and it generated greater than US $100 billion in income via the mid-Nineteen Eighties, in keeping with the IBM article.
The system additionally popularized the idea of a pc improve and launched the trade commonplace of the 8-bit byte, for which Brooks was accountable. The 8-bit byte enabled a pc to run software program that produced each upper- and lower-case characters.
Because of the success of the system, Brooks was appointed lead developer of the 360 household of working programs. The OS/360 was the forerunner of Microsoft’s Home windows, Apple’s iOS, and Google’s Android software program programs.
When Brooks joined the College of North Carolina, he was its first professor of pc science. He served as division chair for 20 years, and he taught and performed analysis on the college for greater than 50 years. His analysis centered primarily on interactive pc graphics and digital actuality.
“Many within the division and past appreciated the truth that in a world full of educational competitors and analysis silos, Brooks fostered a departmental tradition of open collaboration and respect,” says Mary C. Whitton, a retired College of North Carolina analysis professor. The IEEE life senior member labored intently with Brooks for greater than 20 years.
The Turing Award and the Nationwide Medal of Expertise
Brooks was honored a number of instances for his pioneering work. He was awarded the 1993 IEEE John von Neumann Medal and acquired two awards from the IEEE Laptop Society: the 1980 Girls of ENIAC Laptop Pioneer Award and the 1970 W. Wallace McDowell Award.
He acquired the 1999 A.M. Turing Award from the Affiliation for Computing Equipment, referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing. He was honored for “landmark contributions to pc structure, working programs, and software program engineering.”
Brooks additionally acquired the 1985 U.S. Nationwide Medal of Expertise alongside his IBM colleagues Bob Evans and Erich Bloch for the event of System/360. The award was given to them by U.S. President Ronald Reagan.