Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher

Chuck Thacker: Biggerism—I think I coined that word. It grew out of an observation that had been made by Fred Brooks in his book The Mythical Man-Month. One of the things Fred pointed out is that the second system is the hardest one. When you’re building your first system you’re very careful because you’ve never done it before, and you use well-understood engineering principles, and if you get it right and you are successful and then you feel great and you’re willing to tackle something that’s much bigger, and that’s where the danger comes. This goes under the mantle of “the second system syndrome”—that’s what Fred called it. But it’s also exemplified in something called Myhrvold’s First Law of Software which is that “software expands to fill the available space—it’s like a gas.”