Re: The Design of Design

Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:

I've  just read (most of) "The Design of Design" by Fred Brooks,
especially the chapters dealing with the design of the /360,
and it's certainly worth reading.  (I had finished "The Mythical
Man-Month" before).  There are chapters on computer and software
architectures, but also something on a house he himself built.

That he designed (with the help of a professional architect).  It
may be that Brooks and his family helped with some of the interior
work, but professional contractors did the building.

An interesting detail about the /360 design was that they originally
wanted to do a stack-based machine.  It would have been OK for the
mid- and high-end machines, but on low-end machines it would have
been undompetetive, so they rejected that approach.

And it was a serious consideration, the team spending six months
before rejecting it due to those performance limitations.

He discusses the book on computer architecture he co-authored with
Gerrit Blaauw in it (as a project).  Would be _very_ nice to read,
but the price on Amazon is somewhat steep, a bit more than 150 Euros.

Yow.  I think I'll try a local library.

One thing about Brooks - he is not shy of criticizing his own
works when his views changed.  I liked his scathing comments on JCL
so much that I put them in the Wikipedia article :-)

Personally I think his assessment of JCL is harsher than it
deserves.  Don't get me wrong, JCL is not my idea of a great
control language, but it was usable enough in the environment
that customers were used to.  The biggest fault of JCL is that it
is trying to solve the wrong problem.  It isn't clear that trying
to do something more ambitious would have fared any better in the
early 1960s (see also The Second System Effect in MMM).

No comment about JCL still being used today.

His main criticism of his own book on computer architecture was
that it treated computer architecture as a finite field which had
been explored already.
>
@John S:  Not sure if you've read "The Design of Design", but if you
haven't, you probably should.  It might help you to refocus in your
quest to recreate a S/360 (especially the requirement to get the
architecture to work well on a very small machine like the 360/30).
>
Soo... good to read.  Anything else?

I read TDOD somewhat quickly completely through.  After a time I
went back and started re-reading, going more slowly the second
time.  That has turned out to be rather useful, and I would at
least suggest that people try a second, and slower, reading.