Gadgetopia

Inside the High-Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend: This is a compelling story about the search for Jim Gray, the Silicon Valley pioneer that went missing on his sailboat a few months ago.

Jim has geek friends from a lifetime of work, and everyone pitched in to try and find him.

The notion of searching for Gray with tools he helped invent struck a deep chord in the online world. When the hunt for James Kim intensified in December, some bloggers had suggested crowdsourcing a rescue effort by enlisting netsurfers to aid in the search online.

They used everything from mechanical turk to Greasemonkey. Still, Jim was never found.

On May 8, a Wikipedia user appended a phrase to Gray’s entry: “presumed dead.”

We wrote about Jim Gray four years ago. Back then, he was mailing tower computers around the country to transfer large amounts of data.

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.

Rest in peace, Jim, wherever you are.