Ask HN: Underrated Turing Award Recipients?

10 points

5 years ago

I stumbled on this old book today called "Transaction Processing"[0] that never made it past a first edition in the early 90s. It is a leviathan treatise on the unification of conventional and distributed database systems, operating systems, computer networking and software engineering. How could a book like this end up in the digital dust bin?

I looked up the first author, Jim Gray. Apparently, the guy won the Turing Award in 1998 for "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation."[1] I studied computer science at university and have never heard of such a thing. Frankly, I am shaken there are still astonishing ideas, like "transaction processing," that hover unnoticed over the ivory towers. What's the point of lofty ideas if everyone doesn't know about them?

Jim Gray seems to have disappeared mysteriously at sea around 10 years after receiving his Turing Award. Now he doesn't appear a widely recognizable name, even among HN. I searched for "Transaction Processing" in the HN archive, but didn't find anything on Jim Gray.

It makes me wonder who else didn't get all their roses when they were due? Who are the underrated Turing Award recipients?

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Transaction-Processing-Concepts-Techniques-Management/dp/1558601902

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gray_(computer_scientist)

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