[5][6] Born on April 19, 1931, in Durham, North Carolina,[7] he attended Duke University, graduating in 1953 with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics, and he received a Ph.D. in applied mathematics (computer science) from Harvard University in 1956, supervised by Howard Aiken.

Subsequently, he became manager for developing the IBM System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software package.

[12] The Brooks Computer Science Building on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus is named in his honor.

[14] In addition to The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks is also known for the paper "No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering".

[15][16] In 2004 in a talk at the Computer History Museum and also in a 2010 interview in Wired magazine, Brooks was asked "What do you consider your greatest technological achievement?"

[23] Brooks served on a number of US national boards and committees, including:[24] In chronological order:[24] In January 2005, he gave the Turing Lecture on the subject of "Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design".