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By Root 1067 0

as in the paintings of the great masters, buildings by a brilliant architect, or some notable equation. Going deeper, the way they worked may be immortalized: their techniques, their approaches, their professional relationships, and the stories of them at work. For instance, we know a fair bit about the work of Isaac Newton, including the story of him in his early twenties, going to the countryside to avoid an outbreak of the plague and, like any typical young man with too much time on his hands, whiling away his time—inventing calculus and discovering the law of gravitation.

Jim Gray’s Web site reveals a lot about him as a computer scientist. The extensive publications on the site reveal his drive for understanding through experiments and measurements. However, the site is missing those additional, critical stories that help us understand the man at work. Other sites, like the National Library of Medicine’s “leaders in biomedical research and public health Profiles in Science” Web site (http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov), provide a slightly more personal look. At this site, luminaries such as Francis Crick (who discovered the structure of DNA) have archives that include articles, bibliographies, books, brochures, certificates, drawings, exams, interviews, lectures, letters, notebooks, photos, and schedules. Still, we end up with only a fragmentary view of their lives.

Jim Gray’s family, friends, and colleagues are the sole repository of what he was really like: how Jim would slap your back with bubbling enthusiasm when he congratulated you, or how, when he thought your ideas were nuts, he would politely pronounce himself “puzzled” and furrow his brow. His Web site doesn’t tell you of his countless lunches on the least expensive sandwiches in San Francisco, despite his wealth. Then there are all the stories from his family, his sailing buddies, friends from college days, and others.

The story of Jim Gray is spread out on the computers he used, in his personal effects, and in the e-memories and bio-memories of those who knew him. Doing justice to his story means bringing them all together and presenting them in a comprehensible way.

MY MEMORIES OF JIM

After losing Jim, I naturally reminisced about my own relationship with him. A quick search in MyLifeBits turned up the following items that reference Jim in some fashion: 13,000 e-mails, 1,600 Web pages, 100 presentations, 289 photos, 600 documents, several videos, and a phone call. I don’t recall what first prompted Jim and me to get together, but MyLifeBits has a copy of the penciled calendar entry from 1994 for our first meeting. Other calendar entries include Jim taking me out on his sailboat—the same one he would later vanish in.

In 1994, Jim had just finished four years heading DEC’s San Francisco Lab on Market Street and had turned consultant. Since 1989, I had been a Silicon Valley angel investor and a consultant to Microsoft Research and others (since I didn’t spend much time consulting, some friends kidded me that consultant was a code word for “unemployed”). Our first meeting at my Los Altos home revealed our shared views on the importance of industry standards and an approach to increasing computing power via many cheap PCs working in concert together. We found that we both preferred small teams and esteemed building influential prototypes. It was the beginning of a stimulating collaboration and a heartfelt friendship.

After being an independent consultant for a while, Jim felt that he needed the confines of an organization, and he convinced me that I needed more structure too. He had been talking to Microsoft. We believed Microsoft was the place to be because of how we felt about standards and leverage, and moreover the respect and enjoyment of the community we would be part of. I jumped the gun and e-mailed the Redmond folks to hurry up and start a Microsoft Lab in San Francisco for Jim:

Sun Jan 08 15: 41: 55 1995

To: Rick Rashid ; Nathan Myhrvold ; . . . Dave Cutler

From: Gordon Bell

Subject: Approaches to Servers and Scalability . . . and an