X-Nico

2 unusual facts about Fred Brooks


Boeing-Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche

Author Fred Brooks criticized the need for the Comanche to ferry itself across the Atlantic as an example of excess requirements in a project's design phase and their repercussions.

The Man Who Sold the Moon

Fred Brooks's The Mythical Man Month quotes the exchange between Harriman and his chief engineer as an example of a "technical director as boss and producer as right-hand man" relationship.


A picture is worth a thousand words

Computer programmer and author Fred Brooks makes an opposite statement regarding programming in The Mythical Man-Month: "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious."

DOS/360 and successors

When developing a new hardware generation of unified System/360 (or S/360) computers, IBM had originally committed to delivering a single operating system, OS/360, also compatible with low-end machines; but hardware was already available and the OS/360 project fell further and further behind schedule, as described at length by Fred Brooks.


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