The August 2010 issue of Wired has an interview with Fred Brooks. The interviewer, Kevin Kelly, asks Brooks why he wrote his popular book The Mythical Man-Month. Here’s Brooks’ response.
As I was leaving IBM, Thomas Watson, Jr. asked me, “You’ve run the hardware part of the IBM 360, and you’re run the software part; what’s the difference between running the two?” I told him that was too hard a question for an instant answer but that I would think about it. My answer was The Mythical Man-Month.