Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. (born April 19, 1931) is a software engineer and computer scientist, best-known for managing the development of OS/360, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month . It is a very humbling experience to make a multi-million-dollar mistake, but it is also very memorable. Brooks received a Turing Award in 1999.

Born in Durham, North Carolina, he attended Duke University, graduating in 1953, and he received a Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Mathematics (Computer Science) from Harvard University in 1956. Howard Aiken was his advisor.

Brooks joined International Business Machines in 1956, working in Poughkeepsie (city), New York and Yorktown, New York. He worked on the architecture of the IBM 7030 (a $10m scientific supercomputer for the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) and Harvest (computer) computers and then was manager for the development of the System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software they ran.

In addition to The Mythical Man-Month , Brooks is known for No Silver Bullet , an essay on software engineering. In 1965, Brooks left IBM to found the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chaired it for 20 years.

As of 2004 he was still engaged in active research there, primarily in virtual realitys and molecular graphics. In January 2005 he gave the IEE/British Computer Society annual Alan Turing Lecture in London on the subject of Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design .

He is also a confessional Christian (source: [http://www.cs.unc.edu/People/Faculty/Bios/brooks.html])

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