About the Author

Photo credit: © Jerry Markatos

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., is Kenan Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is best known as the “father of the IBM System/360,” having served as project manager for its development and later as manager of the Operating System/360 software project during its design phase. For this work, he, Bob Evans, and Erich Bloch were awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1985. Earlier, he was an architect of the IBM Stretch and Harvest computers. He is a recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award.

At Chapel Hill, Dr. Brooks founded the Department of Computer Science and chaired it from 1964 through 1984. He has served on the National Science Board and the Defense Science Board. His current teaching and research is in computer architecture, interactive computer graphics, and virtual environments.