TerraServer and the Russia adventure..

Jim Gray made many friends and few enemies in his career. Many of the projects he worked on were inspired by one or more of his friends and collaborators in industry and academia. The original idea for an "image server" happened in the early 1990s when Jim was at Digital. Jim had met Jeff Dozier while working on the National Research Council's "Computing the Future" committee [NRC 1994]. Jeff became Dean of the Bren School of Environmental Sciences and chair of UC Santa Barbara's Alexandria Digital Library advisory board. Jeff asked Jim to serve on the board. During an Alexandria board meeting, Jeff and Jim discussed the idea for a "geospatial image server". All they needed was a lot of accessible imagery, someone that wanted it done, and someone foolish enough to load a few tera-bytes of data. The cold war ended enabling the high resolution imagery marketplace. Microsoft SQL Server wanted a scalability internet demonstration. And I walked into ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Tom Barclay
• Keywords: Database, Image Server, Jeff, Jim Gray, SIGMOD 2008