Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [63]
>Folks, Here’s how Jim Gray and I see the next decade or two: A Scalable Network and Platforms (SNAP) architecture is predicated on one set of standards: an ubiquitous ATM network and PC-sized platforms. SNAP allows upsizing i.e. building world-scale computers from a single platform architecture in a scalable fashion. SNAP will encourage further industry de-stratification. It eliminates the traditional computer price class distinctions (mainframes, minis, PCs) and goes a long way to eliminate the stratified business models of traditional computer suppliers. SNAP will cause a computer industry upheaval greater than the early 1990s client-server downsizing wave. That wave created a large UNIX market displacing IBM mainframes and proprietary minis. But the UNIX market is fragmented and small when compared to Compaq and NT. UNIX would have to consolidate around one or two dialects in order to get the volumes required to compete with NT. This seems improbable, so Microsoft’s NT is likely to become the dominant server standard for all hardware platforms, just as Windows garnered the desktop or client side.
Jim sent his own e-mail, pointing out that he had not “put me up” to writing mine, and enumerating the difficulties of operating a remote lab. However, he strongly validated the outlined vision. Microsoft liked the idea, and Jim’s Bay Area Research Center (BARC) opened in the summer of 1995 in San Francisco. I was honored and delighted to join the lab in August of that year. We hired Jim Gemmell to work with me that fall.
Though the BARC lab peaked at only around ten members, it had an impact beyond its numbers. Aerial imagery of the world was brought to the Internet by the BARC Terra Server, which led to the Microsoft Live Maps site and predated Google maps by five years. Later, Jim would turn the view up to the heavens, and work on the Sky Server project. His broad agenda got him involved in such far-flung projects as the “land speed record” for network transmission and fail-safe databases. Meanwhile, Gemmell and I were working on telepresence: putting a conference on the Web, playing with altering someone’s gaze direction in video, and shipping new network protocols in Microsoft operating systems. Later, of course, we got into MyLifeBits.
A memorable event was in May 1997, when Jim gave an on-stage demo with Bill Gates, using more than a hundred PCs to achieve one billion transactions per day. I also recall Jim’s glee on April Fool’s Day 2005, when he had just finished measuring a half-billion transactions per day using his relatively old laptop. He wrote a report observing that a common PC could execute eighty times “more than one of the largest U.S. bank ’s 1970s traffic—it approximates the total U.S. 1970s financial transaction volume. Very modest modern computers can easily solve yesterday’s problems.” The data and report illustrate Gray’s fondness for understanding through constant building and experimentation.
Through various paths, Jim infected me with the importance of data. It’s “all about the data,” he would say. In one of our more playful times, while discussing how to get the concern for data into the national computing resource allocation agenda, we bumped into John Markoff, a friend and columnist at The New York Times who also had an office in our building. We made the case that the national computing agenda was missing the point by just thinking about computation speed. John took our picture in the lab on Friday and wrote an article that appeared in the Times on Sunday. Our compute-centric friends in Washington were not especially happy, but they slowly came around to our view, and after many years the situation is gradually changing from models and simulation to real world, data-based, data-intensive science.
DIGITAL IMMORTALITY
I’ve just told some stories about Jim Gray, and shared an e-mail artifact. But if my publisher would let me, I’d probably include a photo; and in the e-book, some audio and video too. If Jim had lifelogged, there would be a wealth of e-memories to peruse.