Shel
rob pikeFred Brooks, architect of the IBM/360 and its OS, author of The Mythical Man Month, and advocate for the 8-bit byte (enabling lower case letters!), passed away today.
Few in computing have influenced so many.
Comrade elronxenu@robpike 8 bits made a lot of sense.
At Uni I used the Honeywell L66 with 9-bit bytes and 36-bit words and it was ... unnecessary.
J3RN 
@robpike Oh no! I read The Mythical Man Month just about a year ago. Many of his ideas are still very relevant today.
Volkan Özçelik 🦄
Littles 😈 Verified by the Boss
Micah@robpike Man, a legend
Rob Johnston@robpike A manager of mine when I was Sun bought every engineer in the group a copy of the The Mythical Man Month. The lessons in it still stick with me two decades later. RIP
Cypherfox@robpike :(
„Adding more people to a late project makes it even later“
I will cite that today with even more gusto, as every day managers are made, that have not understand it enough.
MarkD@robpike Hard to know which one of those achievements was his greatest.
At first the book springs to mind, but imagine the "byte size" wars that must have raged back then! Bits were expensive!
I heard rumor that Bill Gates said that six bits was more bits than anyone could ever want...
ZZ Bottom
Alexander ShendiOuch. May he rest in peace.
Chris Pitts@robpike @mostalive 😔 One of the very early influences on my software career. His book The Mythical Man Month had a huge impact on me as a baby engineer since it was describing the very anti patterns I was seeing *every day* and thinking “this isn’t right”.
Thank you Fred. You will be missed. But your legacy will live on. I shall continue to threaten difficult management with two copies of your book so they can read it twice as fast….
Kelly@robpike oh shit 😢
Ed Davies@robpike I've bought three copies on the MMM at various times. The first two I leant to people I thought needed to read it but never got back. Don't mind but I hope they passed them on to somebody else who could benefit.
Jerry Song
Michael K Johnson...and, he would certainly want to add, founder of the Computer Science department at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He devoted the majority of his life to teaching.
A couple of years ago, Dr. Brooks gave a 2-hour interview full of details from his life that I found fascinating to watch and listen to.
KeithG@robpike Sad news. The first computer I used was an IBM 360 over 50 years ago at UKAEA Winfrith, when I was in 6th form at school & they let us run simple Fortran programmes. A great experience.
Phil Davis@robpike Damn. My father-in-law made a career out of building PL/360 emulators for Spires at Stanford. He wrote a PL/360 book: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102635302
Kim Spence-Jones #FBPE@robpike
Sad news. The Mythical Man Month was an incredibly influential book. It certainly informed my management style. I still quote it today (“Always plan to build a prototype. You will anyway, so you might as well plan for it”).
Sad news. The Mythical Man Month was an incredibly influential book. It certainly informed my management style. I still quote it today (“Always plan to build a prototype. You will anyway, so you might as well plan for it”).
Steve Hunt 🇪🇺🔶 #RejoinEU #FBPE@robpike very sad news. Mythical Man Month one of the most important books written about the industry and sadly some have still not learned from it decades later!
Chad Hanna 🇬🇧 🇮🇪 🇪🇺@robpike I have, and have read #FredBrooks book #TheMythicalManMonth and I plan to throw one away in his honour (not really!)
Tobias Becker@robpike
A giant in applied computer science left. His largely timeless work will be remembered by the present generations. My condolences go out to the family and friends.
#fredbrooks #nekrologium
https://cs.unc.edu/news-article/remembering-department-founder-dr-frederick-p-brooks-jr/
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/heraldsun/name/frederick-brooks-obituary?id=37962920
A giant in applied computer science left. His largely timeless work will be remembered by the present generations. My condolences go out to the family and friends.
#fredbrooks #nekrologium
https://cs.unc.edu/news-article/remembering-department-founder-dr-frederick-p-brooks-jr/
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/heraldsun/name/frederick-brooks-obituary?id=37962920
MJS 
@robpike So sorry to hear.
David Cuthbert@robpike MMM was required reading in CS1 at Caltech.
Young me: "This is so dumb. I would never make these kinds of mistakes."
Old me: "Ugh. How many projects have I been on that relearned the lessons of MMM the hard way? How many more will there be? Will management ever stop asking for that damn silver bullet?"
RIP