“This was definitely not your two-guys-in-a-garage startup,” said Lampson, who by now held a faculty appointment at Berkeley and set his own name down as a co-founder. It was, however, something infinitely more risky. The BCC pioneers were about to become victims of the “second-system effect.” The theory of second systems was formulated by an IBM executive named Frederick Brooks, whose career supervising large-scale software teams taught him that designers of computer systems tend to build into their second projects all the pet features that tight finances or short deadlines forced them to
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