Jim Gray Recommended Articles (Back to Jim's home page)

Vannevar Bush's paper: As We May Think, the 1945 Atlantic Monthly piece that is the manifesto for Information At Your Fingertips and also the Internet. In that same time Bush also wrote Science's social contract: Science, The Endless Frontier  that has guided US Science policy since then.

Ed Lazowska (U. Washington) faculty lecture on Computer Science, a more modern discussion of the social contract with a focus on computer science.

Alan Newell on how to do research (one hour video lecture) Desires and Diversions slides. Sage advice for scientists on how to live our professional lives.

Michael Lesk's paper on "How much information is there in the world?"

Andrew Odlyzko has a fascinating and insightful series of articles on online publishing: His papers are what got me started on my goal of getting all scientific literature on the web.

Richard Feynman's paper: There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, explaining that computers could be very small (this predates VLSI) and the wonderful 1982 Feynman Lectures on Computation edited by Tony Hey and Robin Allen: Perseus Books; ISBN: 0738202967 that talks about how much energy, space, and time computations should take (close to zero), and an inscrutable (to me) introduction to quantum computing. There is also an out-of-print follow-on Feynman and Computation, Exploring the Limits of Computers edited by Tony Hey, ISBN: 0738200573.

Dave Patterson's talk on Intelligent Disks and a more recent article just talking about disk evolution: Brian Hayes " Terabyte Territory," American Scientist, V. 90, May 2002, pp. 202-208

A nice historical piece on Moore's law (90KB html) a 1996 student papers by Bob Schaller explaining the history of the law and some of its implications.

What Next Revealed a talk by Adi Porobic on technology trends and a technolgoy forecast May 2002 (2 MB).