In his later years, Brinch Hansen published a retrospective of his most important papers, "The Search for Simplicity" (1996), a text for a course in programming for non-majors, "Programming for Everyone in Java" (1999), a retrospective on the evolution of operating systems, "Classic Operating Systems: From Batch Processing to Distributed Systems" (2001), and a retrospective on the evolution of concurrent programming, "The Origin of Concurrent Programming: From Semaphores to Remote Procedure Calls" (2002). He self-published a 2004 memoir, "A Programmer's Story: The Life of a Computer Pioneer", on his website.