On February 19, 1985, Fred Brooks was one of three
former IBM employees to receive the first National Technology
Medal from U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Brooks, Erich
Bloch and Bob O. Evans
were recognized for their contributions to the development
of the IBM System/360, which helped to revolutionize
the data processing industry.
Equipped with a Ph.D from Howard
Aiken's pioneering computer science program at Harvard,
Brooks was recruited by IBM in 1956. Early in his career,
he helped to design the significant IBM
Stretch computer and he was the lead designer of
the IBM 8000-series, which was not put into production.
Bob Evans, who was managing the development of a new
cohesive computer product line, asked Brooks in 1961
to lead the search for a single family of general purpose
systems to serve all customers. The team that Brooks
assembled went on to develop the System/360, one of
the most important technological developments of the
20th century. It was announced in 1964.
Brooks said in 2001: "Today's general purpose
computers are the result of putting together the evolution
of the scientific computing and business computing strands.
We did that in the IBM S/360."
After serving as project manager for System/360, Fred
Brooks took over the responsibility for the development
of the 360 family's critical operating system, OS/360.
In 1965, Brooks accepted an invitation to come to the
University of North Carolina (UNC) and found the University's
computer science department.
Since then, Brooks has been honored for his professional
achievements, including the 1985 Medal of Technology,
the 1995 Bower Award and the 1999 A.M. Turing Award
(the "Nobel Prize of Computing").
When Brooks won the Franklin Institute's Bower Award,
the citation credited Brooks with defining "a concept
of computer architecture that separated computer software
from hardware, allowing those two fundamental realms
of the computer age to develop dynamically and independently."
Of his more recent teaching and research work at UNC,
Brooks said in 2001: "I love what I do. I can't
think of anything I'd rather do than what I do."
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