Chester Gordon Bell (August 19, 1934 – May 17, 2024) was an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), from 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later served as the company's Vice President of Engineering from 1972–1983, overseeing development of the VAX computer systems. Bell's later career included roles as an entrepreneur, investor, founding Assistant Director of NSF's Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate from 1986–1987, and researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research from 1995–2015.
Early life and education
Gordon Bell was born in Kirksville, Missouri. He grew up helping with the family business, Bell Electric, repairing appliances and wiring homes.[1][2][3]
The DEC founders Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson recruited him for their new company in 1960, where he designed the I/O subsystem of the PDP-1, including the first UART. Bell was the architect of the PDP-4, and PDP-6. Other architectural contributions were to the PDP-5 and PDP-11Unibus and General Registers architecture.[5]
After DEC, Bell went to Carnegie Mellon University in 1966 to teach computer science. In 1972, he returned to DEC in 1972 as vice-president of engineering, where he was in charge of the successful VAX computer.[4]
Entrepreneur and policy advisor
Bell reportedly later came to find work at DEC stressful, and suffered a heart attack in March 1983. After he recovered and shortly after he returned to work, he resigned from the company in the summer.[4] Afterwards, he founded Encore Computer,[4] one of the first shared memory, multiple-microprocessor computers to use the snooping cache structure.[citation needed]
During the 1980s he became involved with public policy, becoming the first and founding Assistant Director of the CISE Directorate of the NSF, and led the cross-agency group that specified the NREN.
Bell also established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize (administered by the ACM and IEEE) in 1987 to encourage development in parallel processing. The first Gordon Bell Prize was won by researchers at the Parallel Processing Division of Sandia National Laboratory for work done on the 1000-processor nCUBE 10hypercube.
He was a founding member of Ardent Computer in 1986, becoming VP of R&D in 1988, and remained until it merged with Stellar in 1989, to become Stardent Computer.
Microsoft Research
Between 1991 and 1995, Bell advised Microsoft in its efforts to start a research group, then joined it full-time in August 1995, studying telepresence and related ideas.[citation needed] He was the experiment subject for the MyLifeBits project, an experiment in life-logging (not the same as life-blogging).[4] This was an attempt to fulfill Vannevar Bush's vision of an automated store of the documents, pictures (including those taken automatically), and sounds an individual has experienced in his lifetime, to be accessed with speed and ease. For this, Bell digitized all documents he has read or produced, CDs, emails, and so on.[citation needed]
Bell's law of computer classes[7] was first described in 1972 with the emergence of a new, lower priced microcomputer class based on the microprocessor. Established market class computers are introduced at a constant price with increasing functionality and performance. Technology advances in semiconductors, storage, interfaces and networks enable a new computer class (platform) to form about every decade to serve a new need. Each new usually lower priced class is maintained as a quasi independent industry (market). Classes include: mainframes (1960s), minicomputers (1970s), networked workstations and personal computers (1980s), browser-web-server structure (1990s), palmtop computing (1995), web services (2000s), convergence of cell phones and computers (2003), and Wireless Sensor Networks aka motes[clarification needed] (2004). Bell predicted that home and body area networks would form by 2010.
Legacy and honors
Bell has been described as "a giant in the computer industry",[4] "an architect of our digital age",[6] and "father of the minicomputer".[8]
In 1993, Worcester Polytechnic Institute awarded Bell an Honorary Doctor of Engineering, and in 2010, Bell received an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree from Carnegie Mellon University. The latter award referred to him as "the father of the minicomputer".
Bell co-founded The Computer Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife Gwen Bell in 1979. He was a founding board member of its successor, the Computer History Museum located in Mountain View, California. In 2003, he was made a Fellow of the Museum "for his key role in the minicomputer revolution, and for contributions as a computer architect and entrepreneur".[12] The story of the museum's evolution beginning in the early 1970s with Ken Olsen at Digital Equipment Corporation is described in the Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR-2011-44, "Out of a Closet: The Early Years of The Computer [x]* Museum".[13] A timeline of computing historical machines, events, and people is given on his website.[14] It covers from prehistoric times to the present.
^ abcBell, Gordon (June 23, 2005). "Oral History of Gordon Bell". CHM Reference number: X3202.2006 (Interview). Interviewed by Gardner Hendrie. San Francisco, California: Computer History Museum. Archived from the original on November 20, 2010. Retrieved May 20, 2011.