(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:
Essays on Software Engineering (Addison-Wesley, 1975; ISBN
0-201-00650-2). 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.
This version of the jargon lexicon has been described (with
altogether too much truth for comfort) as an example of second-system
effect run amok on jargon-1....
