Sometimes, more euphoniously, "second-system syndrome") When one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in one's success and design an elephantine feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks in his classic "
The Mythical Man-Month." It described the jump from a set of nice, simple operating systems on the [IBM 70xx]
? series to
OS/360 on the 360 series. A similar effect can also happen in an evolving system; see [Brooks's Law]
?, [creeping elegance]
?, [creeping featurism]
?. See also
Multics,
OS/2, the
X Window System, [software bloat]
?.
This article (or an earlier version of it) contains material from FOLDOC, used with permission.
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