During my first week at UNC Chapel Hill, I had an incredibly opportunity through the honors program where a handful of new students (including myself, an aspring CS student) got to hang out with Fred Brooks for an evening. I don't think I really knew who he was at the time, but I did recognize his name as the one on the CS Building.

When we talk about Fred Brooks now, we're usually talking about the things he's written (MMM, No Silver Bullet, etc.) or the impact he's had on computing (8 bit byte, founding the CS depts, etc.). He didn't talk about any of that with us freshmen. Other than a brief introduction, he didn't talk about any of that at all.

Instead, he talked to us about what he saw as the future. The most exciting thing going forward, as he saw it in August of 2011, was the development of the interface between biology and computing. One of the things that stuck with me was that he said he hoped students today looked at biology the way he looked at computer science back in the 50s and 60s, as a land of unlimited potential.