(Sometimes, more euphoniously, "second-system syndrome") When
one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant,
and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose
in one's success and design an
elephantine feature-laden
monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks in his
classic "
The Mythical Man-Month. It described the jump from
a set of nice, simple operating systems on the IBM 70xx
series to
OS/360 on the 360 series. A similar effect can
also happen in an evolving system; see
Brooks's Law,
creeping elegance,
creeping featurism. See also
Multics,
OS/2,
X,
software bloat.