At the time, he was interested in collecting as much astronomical data as possible, to create a unified model of the sky.
He viewed it as a logical next step, after creating one of the first unified databases of Earth imagery (Microsoft Terraserver). "I love astronomers," he would sau, "They want to give the data away."
If one can judge a person after a matter of a few hours, then I submit that all of the wonderful things to be said about Jim Gray are true.
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One story about Terraserver: https://www.vice.com/en/article/8q89q4/microsofts-terraserve...
S.G. Djorgovski1,2 and R. Williams, "Virtual Observatory: From Concept to Implementation", 2005 - PDF: https://authors.library.caltech.edu/28224/1/114.pdf
WorldWide Telescope: https://www.worldwidetelescope.org/
I don’t have much more to add beyond that. It’s one thing to know someone is a significant force due to their academic legacy, but another to see it in how people who knew them intimately speak of them after they are gone.
http://jimgray.azurewebsites.net/papers/tandemtr85.7_whydoco...
I couldn't help laughing at that
I still find Tandem NonStop Systems interesting, and they're still being sold by HPE running on standard x86 servers.
[0] https://jimgray.azurewebsites.net/papers/TandemTR90.1_WhySto...
But when it comes to failures I would bet things must have improved when you measure failure per operation.
Computers did not fail often 30 years ago. If they failed orders of magnitudes more nowadays we would definitely notice.
I have absolutely no numbers on reliability in any kind of metric.
I guess the book must still be in storage somewhere, I never through away anything...