(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.

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