For a half-decade, the San Francisco bureau of the New York Times had a remarkable resource. Just five floors above us were the offices of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center and more specifically, Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, two of the world’s legendary computer scientists. I would have coffee with Jim on occasion, and from time to time, we would head down the alleyway to have lunch at Yank Sing, the local dim sum restaurant.

During the 1970s and ’80s at I.B.M. and Tandem Computer, he helped lead the creation of modern database and transaction processing technologies that today underlie all electronic commerce and more generally, the organization of digital information. Yet, for all of his impact on the world, Jim was both remarkably low-key and approachable. He was always willing to take time to explain technical concepts and offer independent perspective on various issues in the computer industry

The Times bureau moved several years ago. Then in January of 2007, Jim was lost at sea while on a day sailing trip beyond the San Francisco Bay aboard his boat Tenacious. The Coast Guard found no trace of his boat, and an intense search led by volunteers turned up only ambiguous clues about what had befallen him.

I have frequently missed Jim’s sage advice and perspective since then, but it wasn’t until Saturday at a tribute in his honor and memory at the University of California at Berkeley that the impact of both his technical contributions and who he was as a person really struck home.

Roughly 600 friends and colleagues attended two separate events on campus intended to capture his technical and personal contributions. The audience was a cross-section of the computer industry’s best and brightest, and speaker after speaker repeated the point that virtually everyone thought that Dr. Gray was one of their closest friends, only to discover after he disappeared that that had been true for literally thousands of people.

“He was one of the world’s great listeners,” said Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer scientist, who in recent years had collaborated with Dr. Gray on a series of projects designed to provide powerful computational tools to scientists. “I thought we had a special relationship,” he said, only to realize that there were 500 special relationships of the same kind.

Several speakers quoted Jimi Hendrix, who once noted, “Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens,” to try to explain Jim Gray’s special qualities.

The object lesson taught by Dr. Gray, said Dr. Lazowska, was that while there is nothing you can do about improving your I.Q., it is possible to work at becoming a terrific human being.

“Jim was the world’s greatest connector,” he said. “He connected ideas and people and he didn’t understand boundaries, either corporate or national.”

In 1998, Dr. Gray was honored with the Turing Award, the field’s most prestigious prize, for his work in transaction processing. Although it is a remarkably arcane area, David Vaskevitch, chief technical officer for business platform at Microsoft, neatly summed up the financial computing challenge that Dr. Gray solved as follows: “if I move funds from one account to the other, how am I going to make sure they don’t disappear in the middle or end up in both accounts?”

His technical contributions continued until he disappeared. In recent years, Dr. Gray focused on building vast databases for both scientists and laymen. The TerraServer project was an early Web service offering access to a global repository of satellite images of the earth. He also sparked work on SkyServer, a parallel project that organizes and stores the world’s astronomical data and makes it easily accessible to anyone on the Web.

During the day’s remembrances, it was announced that the Jim Gray Chair in Computer Systems will be established at UC Berkeley, funded by more than $2 million in contributions from Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com; Bill Gates, the chairman and co-founder of Microsoft; Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google; Mike Stonebraker, co-founder of Ingres; and the Hewlett Foundation.

In addition to being brilliant, Dr. Gray was an iconoclast. Speaker after speaker fondly told stories that reflected his disdain for bureaucracy and his independence. Shankar Sastry, dean of the college of engineering at UC Berkeley, noted that when organizers were planning the Saturday tribute, they felt the attire should be business casual; Dr. Gray, however, rarely wore anything but jeans and was once thrown out of the I.B.M. Scientific Center in Los Angeles for failing to meet the company’s dress code.

While working at I.B.M.’s Thomas J. Watson Jr. Research Laboratory in New York, Mr. Gray asked his boss if he could relocate to an I.B.M. laboratory in San Jose. When he was told that he couldn’t, he said, “All right, then, I quit.”

He then got in his Volkswagen, drove across the country and was rehired by an I.B.M. laboratory in California.

“We had a research group in San Francisco because Jim lived in San Francisco, and if he’d wanted to move to Monaco, we’d have a research center in Monaco,” said Rick Rashid, senior vice president for research at Microsoft.

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BERKELEY, CA – February 4, 2008. Three organizations dedicated to the advancement of computing science, IEEE Computer Society, ACM, and UC Berkeley, today announced they will join the family and colleagues of Jim Gray in hosting a tribute to the legendary computer science pioneer, missing at sea since Jan. 28, 2007.

The tribute will be held May 31 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. The general session will be from 9-10:30 a.m., followed by technical sessions that will require registration. Registration and other information can be found at: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/ipro/jimgraytribute

Gray is known for his groundbreaking work as a programmer, database expert and Microsoft engineer. Gray’s work helped make possible such technologies as the cash machine, ecommerce, online ticketing, and deep databases like Google. In 1998, he received the ACM A.M. Turing Award, the most prestigious honor in computer science. He was appointed an IEEE Fellow in 1982, and also received IEEE Charles Babbage Award.

“It is important to note that this is a tribute, not a memorial,” said Mike Olson, Oracle’s vice president of embedded technologies. “Many people in our industry, including me, are deeply indebted to Jim for his intellect, his vision, and his unselfish willingness to be a teacher and a mentor.”

“Jim was a true visionary and leader in this field,” said Shankar Sastry, dean of the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley. “We are honored to host this tribute to Jim’s remarkable achievements and the impact he made on so many of us.”

Speakers at the tribute will address the attributes and accomplishments that contributed to Gray’s world renowned reputation.

  • Joe Hellerstein, professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, will give the tribute’s opening remarks.

  • Leading therapist and researcher Pauline Boss will speak on understanding ambiguous loss.

  • Mike Olson, vice president of Embedded Technologies at Oracle, will discuss the search effort for Gray.

  • Mike Harrison, professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, will explore Gray’s impact on Berkeley.

  • Microsoft Architect Pat Helland will speak about Gray as a mentor to his colleagues, while Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, will discuss Gray’s capacity as a mentor for faculty and students.

  • Mike Stonebraker, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, will discuss why Gray received so many awards.

  • Finally, David Vaskevitch, Microsoft’s senior vice president and CTO for Business Platform, and Rich Rashid, Microsoft’s senior vice president of research, will speak about Gray’s contributions to the computing industry.

Gray attended the University of California, Berkeley from 1961-1969 and earned the university’s first PhD in Computer Science. Over the course of his career, Gray worked as a researcher at Bell Labs, IBM, Tandem Computers, Digital Equipment Corporation, and finally Microsoft, where he was hired in 1995. When Gray joined Microsoft, he convinced the company to open a research center in San Francisco so that he and his wife, Donna, wouldn’t have to move to Redmond, Wash.

At Microsoft, he built a website called Terra Server, which brought high-resolution satellite imagery to the masses seven years before Google Earth, and SkyServer, the most widely used astronomical resource in the world.

Jim Gray disappeared without a trace on a sailing trip to the Farallon Islands on January 28, 2007.