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Virtuous Reality Nobody's
got connections like Fred Brooks.
Some of the computer's most basic functions by Kevin O'Kelley '92 (MA)
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 Georgia Parker/UNC Design Services |
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In Fred Brooks' office is a metal box with six switches. Above each switch is a label: "COM," "CLASS," "MY MEETING," "O MEETING," "EVAL," "SOLO TECH." On the shelf above the box sit six clocks, each one set to a different time. It's Brooks' way of keeping track. "Every Monday we set the clocks to 12," he explained, as he looked at each clock. "Now you can see this week that we've had 17 hours and 20 minutes of administrative work and two hours and 15 minutes of teaching and two hours and 20 minutes of research, and no general University committee work and no school work and no teaching." He turned, sat down and smiled. "The best way to find out where it goes is to know where it went." The work and thought of Frederick Brooks—the founder of UNC's computer science department and one of the fathers of modern computing—seem governed by an acute sense of interconnection. A slice of a day, a single computer design project, even the discipline of computer science itself—each ultimately is judged by its place in a larger schema. There are no throwaway moments. Everything is for keeps. Brooks has many accomplishments to his name. His work on three-dimensional computer graphics has driven the technology's development, as well as establishing UNC as a world leader in the field. He wrote what is now considered the definitive work on managing software development projects, The Mythical Man-Month, which still is in print after 25 years. The citations of his innumerable awards—among them the 1999 A.M. Turing Award ("The Nobel Prize of Computing"), the 1995 Bower Award and the 1985 National Medal of Technology—often describe his work in vague, albeit impressive terms. Writers—and readers—crave tangibles: Crediting a scientist with the sole invention of a specific object has a satisfying completeness. But Brooks' accomplishments as a computer scientist come as much from his capacity to work with others as it does with his gift for individual research. Furthermore, his accomplishments are difficult to describe—and that difficulty testifies to the magnitude of his work: To put it bluntly, contemporary personal computers are unimaginable without the achievements of Fred Brooks. Many of the features we take for granted in personal computers—their use for word processing, the capacity to call up one of hundreds of programs in a fraction of a second, the capacity to load a software package on any number of different computers—are all traceable to the work of Brooks and to his sense of connection.
'Absolutely
fascinating' He still remembers the day—in August 1944—he learned what a computer was. "I was 13 years old and growing up in Greenville, North Carolina. I was sitting in the Sheppard Memorial Library and reading, I believe, Time." He was reading about the dedication of the Mark I—the first "universal calculator," a machine that could perform mathematical computation without a human operator. "It was a whole new concept to me, and absolutely fascinating." He had always wanted to be a scientist, and when the teenage Brooks went to Duke he studied physics, which had been his favorite high school subject. But he never forgot his fascination with the Mark I. When it came time to pursue graduate work, he went to Harvard to study with the man who designed it, Howard Aiken. "Aiken had in the computation laboratory at Harvard one of the handful of programs in what we would today call computer science," Brooks said. "There it was called applied mathematics, but it was indistinguishable from today's computer science. "At the time I went to graduate school," Brooks added, "there were no computer science departments." Brooks' work at Harvard was a fitting prelude to his later work ushering in the age of the general use computer. Aiken wanted his students to do dissertation research on the non-scientific uses of computers. He encouraged Brooks to design a computer that could do payrolls. "So I designed a payroll computer," he says matter-of-factly, "and concluded that there was very little to gain from specializing a computer for payroll. "There was a lot to gain from specializing a computer for file maintenance applications—so the same computer could do utility billing and insurance premium accounting and payroll and Social Security record keeping and so forth all equally well." Some journalists who have written about Brooks assert that this project led to his job with IBM. Brooks demurs. "No. The education led to the job." He clearly considers it an important distinction. IBM recruited Brooks in 1956 to work on the Stretch computer, one of the first supercomputers. "We built the first machine for Los Alamos laboratory. We built the second for the National Security Agency—and for that we built an attachment called Harvest, designed for language processing." He starts to smile. "Stretch was about five feet high, five feet deep and 15 feet long. Harvest added another 20 feet."
The
S/360 "We had a set of products coming along called the 8000 series. [It was] a higher-end family of computers." An IBM vice president, Vincent Learson, thought the company should delay introduction of the 8000 series and instead focus on producing a more general purpose computer that could be sold to both higher- and lower-end markets as well as use the recently developed integrated circuit technology, Brooks said. To develop this new computer, Learson brought in one Bob Evans as machine development manager to work out a plan for producing it. Brooks led the fight to focus company resources on putting the 8000 on the market as soon as possible. The struggle lasted six months. The 8000 was put on hold. Then Brooks got a surprise. Evans asked him to lead the design and production team for the new general-purpose computer. |
 IBM Corporate Archives |
| The IBM S/360 has been called one of the most important technological developments of the 20th century. Brooks led the design and production team for the new general-purpose computer. It hit the market in April 1965. Many IBM salesmen sold their year's quota within a few hours. |
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"You could have knocked me over with a feather," Brooks laughs now. "When Evans called me and asked me to take over his crown jewels after we had been fighting for six months, I was absolutely astounded." The team Brooks assembled developed the computer, which became known as the IBM S/360 and has been called one of the most important technological developments of the 20th century. It hit the market in April 1965. Many IBM salesmen sold their year's quota within a few hours. When pressed, Brooks acknowledges what his team accomplished in producing the IBM S/360. "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." But even that doesn't do justice to the enormity—let alone the complexity—of what he and his colleagues accomplished. When the 360 was in development, Brooks insisted the operating system employ eight-bit bytes. He always had been interested in the computer's potential for what we now call word processing. With eight-bit bytes (as opposed to six-bit bytes, which many previous computers had used) a computer could run software that produced both upper and lower-case characters. (A tale has made the rounds that Brooks not only worked with bytes but coined the word itself. Not true. It was Werner Bucholz, chief architect of the Stretch computer.) Brooks' team also included disks—as opposed to just tapes—in each computer. This one step endowed the IBM S/360 with power and speed unprecedented in a general use computer. "[Having a disk] meant you could have a big library of programs and call [one of] them up in a fraction of a second rather than having to run them in a pre-planned sequence [on a tape]." Another of his achievements altered the nature of both computer use and the industry itself. "What we did was essentially make six different computers, all what we would call compatible. It means that two machines will run the same program and get the same answer." What it also meant was that software and hardware became separate production processes—and ultimately, different industries. When Brooks won the Franklin Institute's Bower Award in 1995, the citation made it clear how revolutionary the development of the IBM S/360 was. The citation credits Brooks with defining "a concept of computer architecture that separated computer software from hardware allowing these two fundamental realms of the computer age to develop dynamically and independently." In other words, no IBM S/360, no software industry. No Adobe, no MicroSoft, no RedHat. 'I
was led by very clear steps' As difficult as the decision was, he decided to accept. "I'm a Christian, and I was led by very clear steps to make this shift in life," Brooks said. "I had always been teaching. I like to teach. While I was at IBM I taught one year at Vassar and one at Columbia, and I had maintained a steady publication schedule." How did he find the time to do that while laying the foundations of an IBM career? "Nights and weekends," he laughed. He and his wife also had taken an extra measure to make it easier to move to academic life if the opportunity arose. They didn't want to get used to the expensive lifestyle that comes with a corporate career. His wife worked for IBM as well—so they lived on her salary and saved his. The offer was even more attractive, coming from UNC. "My kid's grandparents were alive in Greenville. And any high schooler growing up in North Carolina made a lot of trips to Chapel Hill for scholastic debates and music festivals." In addition to his natural inclination to teach, and the attraction of living in his native state, Brooks felt the time was right to found a department devoted purely to computer science. "I was convinced that computer science had reached the point where making it an independent discipline made sense." He saw a clear need for the conduct of research and the design of curricula "that would be judged by the standards of computer science and not another discipline. "This was the opportunity to do that." 'Out
here in the backwoods' When he arrived at UNC, IBM was prepared to grant $100,000 to the new computer science department. He had a better idea: Grant only a third of the money to UNC. He asked the company to give one-third to N.C. State and a third to Duke, to help them establish curricula in computer science. "I'm still amazed [he did that]" says Lib Moore Jones, the first secretary of the computer science department. Jones, who was departmental secretary for 14 years, believes the act ultimately led to the establishment of the Triangle Universities Computation Center in 1965. Until closed in 1990, the center, a joint venture of the three universities, provided mainframe computing services to all three as well as the Research Triangle Institute. "That was the money that made the difference and fostered a sense of relationship between all three," Jones said. Brooks dismisses the act as simple pragmatism: "It's very clear today—as it was then—that the only way an institution out here in the backwoods of North Carolina can achieve excellence on the scale of the Harvards and MITs was to do it jointly; so building that team together was of crucial importance. "That's the major component of any strategy in the Triangle today." |
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Seeing and Feeling In virtual reality (VR) experiments, people wearing special headsets are able to "see" an environment. This is especially helpful in designing new environments, whether the floor plan of a building or the layout of a warship. A UNC research project not only allows you to "see" what an environment looks like but also what it "feels" like. Hybrid reality allows users to actually feel and bump into the objects seen in the virtual environment. Researchers hope to find out if virtual environments seem more real when users cannot walk through virtual walls or solid objects, as they have been able to do in most VR environments. UNC researchers set up a model kitchen made of styrofoam, simulating countertops, work islands, a sink and other features of a kitchen. Wearing the VR headset, a user sees a synthetic visual kitchen, which replicates, with half-inch accuracy, an actual kitchen. However, the visual model and the styrofoam model have been carefully aligned so that when the user reaches out to touch something such as a countertop corner, the corner in the styrofoam model is where the visual information indicates it will be.
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