A Conversation with Jim Gray

Sit down, turn off your cellphone, and prepare to be fascinated. Clear your schedule, because once you’ve started reading this interview, you won’t be able to put it down until you’ve finished it.

Who would ever, in this time of the greatest interconnectivity in human history, go back to shipping bytes around via snail mail as a preferred means of data transfer? (Really, just what type of throughput does the USPS offer?) Jim Gray would do it, that’s who. And we’re not just talking about Zip disks, no sir; we’re talking about shipping entire hard drives, or even complete computer systems, packed full of disks.