A Conversation with Jim Gray: This is a long-running, far-reaching interview with the head of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center. The focus of the interview is storage, but he veers off onto topics like the invention of the relational database and Gray’s winning of the Turing Award.
However, the thing people are writing about is Gary’s admission that he’s mailing (postal mailing, that is) a lot of data. He’s working on the TerraServer project, and he has to get terabytes of information around the country. He started off mailing hard drives, but then he ran out of capacity, so now he’s mailing entire, multi-drive computers to other people – mailing, as in, put in a box and have UPS come pick it up – soley to move data around. He explains why it’s just easier that way.