Many of these problem solvers have struggled, too, with the idiosyncratic nature of the particular grief that comes with a missing person whose death is unconfirmed. They have had to respect the wishes of the Gray family not to hold funerals or memorials, and, for a time, not to refer to him in the past tense.
"What the community hasn't had, and only partially has now, is permission to mourn," said Pat Helland, a software architect at Microsoft who knew Gray for more than 25 years. "Even though we're all rational, it's not appropriate to say, 'Jim is dead.' But we all understand we won't see Jim again."
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In the lingo of database programs, which were Gray's specialty, something must have happened that January day that overrode Gray's intent.
He told his family he planned to sail near the Farallon Islands, a wildlife refuge 27 miles off the Northern California shoreline. He called his wife and daughter from the sailboat that day. When he didn't return, his wife alerted the harbor master, who called the U.S. Coast Guard.
Gray's disappearance shocked the high-tech community. He was a legend in the field for his nimble and wide-ranging mind and for applying his expertise in databases to help researchers in other fields, such as human genomics, astronomy and oceanography. He had worked at IBM Corp., Tandem Computers Inc. and Digital Equipment Corp. For more than 10 years, he oversaw Microsoft's research lab in San Francisco. In 1998, he was awarded the computer industry's highest honor, the A.M. Turing Award.
Some people are good at organizing closets and drawers. Jim Gray was a personal organizer of information, creating databases that would make information usable. He believed that if he could arrange information in an elegant way, he could accelerate the sciences.
As the Coast Guard searched 132,000 square miles by boat, helicopter and plane, Gray's friends and colleagues from companies such as Amazon.com Inc., Oracle Corp., Google Inc. and Microsoft used their connections in industry and government to reposition satellites to take images of the California coastline.
They wrote software programs to analyze data and enlisted an army of 3,000 volunteers through an Amazon program called Mechanical Turk to sift through the pictures for white specks that might be Tenacious. The program was used again last fall -- also unsuccessfully -- to analyze satellite images when the adventurer Steve Fossett and his plane went missing over Nevada.
