Frederick Brooks Jr.

Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. was an American computer architect and software engineer who managed the development of IBM System/360 mainframe computer family and its OS/360 operating system before founding and chairing the computer science department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1964, a position he held for twenty years. During his time at IBM, Brooks coined the term computer architecture, and he later wrote The Mythical Man-Month, an influential book drawing on his System/360 experience that argued adding more programmers to a late software project tends to make it later still, an observation now known as Brooks law. Brooks considered his most consequential engineering decision at IBM to have been changing the System/360 byte size from six bits to eight bits, a change that enabled the practical use of lowercase letters in computing. He received the National Medal of Technology in 1985 and the ACM Turing Award in 1999, and he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.