Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
addition to
The Mythical Man-Month
, Brooks is also known for his seminal paper "No Sil-
ver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering.")
It was in
The Mythical Man-Month
that Brooks first enunciated, and proved, what has
since become known as Brooks' Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes
it later." Although virtually every systems architect and programmer has been introduced to
Brooks' Law at one point or another, not all adhere to it - especially in the frantic panic of a
chronically late and expensive software project. Some have called Brooks' topic "the Bible
of software engineering." Brooks in turn has quipped that the comparison comes from the
fact that "everybody quotes it, some people read it, and [only] a few people go by it."
Ultimately, Brooks saw programming as a blend of the practical and the mystical: "The
programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds
castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination ... Yet the program con-
struct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing vis-
ible outputs separate from the construct itself ... The magic of myth and legend has come
true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen
comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be."
*
By the early 1960s, such organizations as the Internal Revenue Service, Blue Cross, and
NASA were deep into the use of IBM equipment, although the latter also used mainframes
from Honeywell, Digital Equipment Corporation, and other players. (Note: It was not until
1959 that the United States Department of the Treasury authorized the IRS to completely
computerize its functions.)
Early competitors to the 360 gained little traction, and little market share. Popular at
weapons laboratories such as Lawrence Livermore, however, was the Control Data Corpor-
ation's super-fast 6600, designed by Seymour Cray in 1964 and soon considered the leader
of a new class of machines: "supercomputers." But Cray's machine had a major flaw. It was
largely incompatible with other machines. Thus most installations adopting the 6600 also
wound up adopting a System/360 right along with it.
Another would-be competitor for the 360 was RCA's 501 and 301 machines. Although
incorporating one of the first COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) compilers,
these machines were quite slow, and thus offered no serious threat to IBM. In 1964, RCA
launched the Spectra 70 series - four machines (two of them using integrated circuits) de-
signed for the express purpose of emulating IBM's 360, but selling at around 40% less. The
Spectra 70 machines made significant inroads, but collapsed in appeal once IBM launched
its competitively-priced System/370 in 1970.
At the same time that mainframes gained ground, machines dubbed "minicomputers"
also began to build a base - not as competition for mainframes, but as adjuncts to the larger
