Frederick P. Brooks Jr., a prolific laptop scientist and longtime professor of laptop science, died on 17 November on the age of 91.
While working as a undertaking supervisor at IBM within the Sixties, the IEEE Life Fellow led the event of the System/360 laptop 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 undertaking on the time. He is credited with coining the time period laptop 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 Mythical Man-Month, a e book of essays printed in 1975 that detailed classes he discovered from challenges he confronted whereas growing the OS/360.
Brooks left IBM in 1964 to discovered the University of North Carolina’s laptop science division in Chapel Hill.
Although he retired from educating in 2013, Brooks was nonetheless lively within the college’s analysis program in digital environmentsand scientific visualization till 2020.
Breakthroughs at IBM
After incomes a bachelor’s diploma in physics in 1953 from Duke University, 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 would do payrolls—below the supervision of laptop pioneer Howard Aiken, who had designed IBM’s Harvard Mark I laptop.
Brooks joined IBM in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1957. His first task was engaged on the IBM 7030. Known as Stretch, it was the primary transistorized supercomputer. Although 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 undertaking was the IBM 8000 collection of computer systems. In 1961 IBM deemed the undertaking a failure and terminated it.
That identical 12 months, Brooks was tasked with main the event of a household of general-purpose techniques for each business and scientific purposes. Before the discharge of IBM System/360, laptop techniques had been incompatible with one another, even when they had been developed by the identical producer. Software and peripherals from previous techniques wouldn’t work with new ones, making it pricey for patrons to improve their {hardware}, in keeping with an IBM article in regards to the expertise.
The System/360, launched in 1964, contained six processor fashions with 40 peripherals. The line was named the 360 as a result of it addressed the wants of all varieties of prospects. Within 5 years of its launch, greater than 3,000 models had been offered, and it generated greater than US $100 billion in income by 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.
Due to the success of the system, Brooks was appointed lead developer of the 360 household of working techniques. The OS/360 was the forerunner of Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s iOS, and Google’s Android software program techniques.
When Brooks joined the University of North Carolina, he was its first professor of laptop 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 laptop graphics and digital actuality.
“Many in the department and beyond appreciated the fact that in a world full of academic competition and research silos, Brooks fostered a departmental culture of open collaboration and respect,” says Mary C. Whitton, a retired University of North Carolina analysis professor. The IEEE life senior member labored intently with Brooks for greater than 20 years.
The Turing Award and the National Medal of Technology
Brooks was honored a number of occasions for his pioneering work. He was awarded the 1993 IEEE John von Neumann Medal and acquired two awards from the IEEE Computer Society: the 1980 Women of ENIAC Computer Pioneer Award and the 1970 W. Wallace McDowell Award.
He acquired the 1999 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, often called the Nobel Prize of computing. He was honored for “landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering.”
Brooks additionally acquired the 1985 U.S. National Medal of Technology 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.