Second-system effect

The second-system effect or second-system syndrome is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.[1]

The phrase was first used by Fred Brooks in his book The Mythical Man-Month, first published in 1975. It described the jump from a set of simple operating systems on the IBM 700/7000 series to OS/360 on the 360 series,[2] which happened in 1964.[3]

  1. ^ Raymond, Eric. "Second-system effect". The Jargon File. Retrieved June 24, 2013.
  2. ^ This article is based on material taken from Second-system+effect at the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.
  3. ^ Brooks, Frederick P. Jr. (1975). "The Second-System Effect". The Mythical Man-Month: essays on software engineering. Addison Wesley Longman. pp. 53–58. ISBN 0-201-00650-2.