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From: hal@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Hal Perkins)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Mythical Man-Month (was: Architect's Trap)
Message-ID: <743@gvax.cs.cornell.edu>
Date: Thu, 5-Mar-87 10:14:06 EST
Article-I.D.: gvax.743
Posted: Thu Mar  5 10:14:06 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Mar-87 00:48:52 EST
References: <1400@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <101200003@datacube> <522@ames.UUCP>
Reply-To: hal@gvax.cs.cornell.edu.cs.cornell.edu (Hal Perkins)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept. Ithaca NY
Lines: 16

Since Brooks's Mythical Man-Month book has come up here, I thought the
following might be of interest.  Quoted from the essay "People Are Our
Most Important Product", Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., in Software Engineering
Education, Gibbs and Fairley eds., Springer-Verlag, 1987:

	The peak year in sales for The Mythical Man-Month was only
	two years ago.  Yet the book was written in 1975, about an
	experience in 1963-65.  The fact that it has the slightest
	relevance now is a sad comment on the progress of the
	discipline.

(I suggest that further discussions of this be moved to somewhere
suitable for software engineering topics, not net.arch.)

Hal Perkins
Cornell CS