(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.
[
Jargon File]