Brooks joined
IBM in 1956, working in
Poughkeepsie, New York, and
Yorktown, New York. He worked on the architecture of the
IBM 7030 Stretch, a $10 million scientific supercomputer of which nine were sold, and the
IBM 7950 Harvest computer for the National Security Agency. Subsequently, he became manager for developing the
IBM System/360 family of computers and the
OS/360 software package. During this time he coined the term "
computer architecture". His research was mainly in
virtual environments and
scientific visualization. He was the founding Kenan Professor of Computer Science at UNC until his retirement in 2015. The Brooks Computer Science Building on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus is named in his honor. A few years after leaving IBM, he wrote
The Mythical Man-Month. The seed for the book was planted by IBM's then-CEO
Thomas J. Watson Jr., who asked in Brooks's exit interview why it was so much harder to manage software projects than hardware projects. In this book, Brooks made the now-famous statement: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later", which has since come to be known as
Brooks's law. In addition to
The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks is also known for the paper
"No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering". In 2004 in a talk at the
Computer History Museum and also in a 2010 interview in
Wired magazine, Brooks was asked "What do you consider your greatest technological achievement?" Brooks responded, "The most important single decision I ever made was to change the IBM 360 series from a 6-
bit byte to an
8-bit byte, thereby enabling the use of lowercase letters. That change propagated everywhere." A "20th anniversary" edition of
The Mythical Man-Month with four additional chapters was published in 1995. As well as
The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks has authored or co-authored many books and
peer reviewed papers "
No Silver Bullet", and
The Design of Design.
Service and memberships Brooks served on a number of US national boards and committees, including: •
Defense Science Board (1983–86) • Member, Artificial Intelligence Task Force (1983–84) • Chairman, Military Software Task Force (1985–87) • Member, Computers in Simulation and Training Task Force (1986–87) •
National Science Board (1987–92)
Awards and honors In chronological order: • Honorary Doctor of Technical Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich (1991) •
IEEE John von Neumann Medal, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (1993) •
Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery (1994) •
Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (DFBCS) (1994) • International
Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), UK (1994) •
Allen Newell Award, Association for Computing Machinery (1994) •
Bower Award and Prize in Science, Franklin Institute (1995) • CyberEdge Journal Annual Sutherland Award (April 1997) •
Turing Award, Association for Computing Machinery (1999) • Member,
National Academy of Sciences (2001) • Received the
Computer History Museum's Fellow Award, for his contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering. (2001) •
Eckert–Mauchly Award, Association for Computing Machinery and The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers–Computer Society (2004) • IEEE Virtual Reality Career Award (2010) In January 2005, he gave the
Turing Lecture on the subject of "Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design". ==Personal life==