Gordon Bell

For other people named Gordon Bell, seeGordon Bell (disambiguation).

Gordon Bell
Born	(1934-08-19)August 19, 1934 Kirksville, Missouri,U.S.
Died	May 17, 2024(2024-05-17)(aged 89) Coronado, California,U.S.
Alma mater	MIT(BS 1956, MS 1957)
Known for	Computer architecture
Spouse	Gwen Bell
Awards	National Medal of Technology IEEE John von Neumann Medal NAE Member NAS Member AAAS Fellow IEEE Fellow ACM Fellow CHMFellow
Scientific career
Institutions	DEC,Microsoft
Website	gordonbell.azurewebsites.net

Chester Gordon Bell(August 19, 1934 – May 17, 2024) was an Americanelectrical engineerand manager. An early employee ofDigital Equipment Corporation(DEC), from 1960–1966, Bell designed several of theirPDPmachines and later served as the company's Vice President of Engineering from 1972–1983, overseeing development of theVAXcomputer 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 atMicrosoft Researchfrom 1995–2015.

Early life and education

Gordon Bell was born inKirksville, Missouri.He grew up helping with the family business, Bell Electric, repairing appliances and wiring homes.

Bell received aBS(1956),andMS(1957) inelectrical engineeringfromMIT.He then went to theNew South Wales University of Technology(now UNSW) in Australia on aFulbright Scholarshipin 1957–58,where he taught classes on computer design, programmed one of the first computers to arrive in Australia (called UTECOM, anEnglish Electric DEUCE), and published his first academic paper. Returning to the US, he worked in the MIT Speech Computation Laboratory under ProfessorKen Stevens,where he wrote the firstanalysis by synthesisprogram.

Career

Digital Equipment Corporation

TheDECfoundersKen OlsenandHarlan Andersonrecruited him for their new company in 1960, where he designed theI/Osubsystem of thePDP-1,including the firstUART.Bell was the architect of thePDP-4,andPDP-6.Other architectural contributions were to thePDP-5andPDP-11Unibusand General Registers architecture.

After DEC, Bell went toCarnegie Mellon Universityin 1966 to teachcomputer science.In 1972, he returned to DEC in 1972 as vice-president of engineering, where he was in charge of the successfulVAXcomputer.

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.Afterwards, he foundedEncore Computer,one of the first shared memory, multiple-microprocessor computers to use thesnooping cachestructure.

During the 1980s he became involved with public policy, becoming the first and founding Assistant Director of theCISEDirectorate of theNSF,and led the cross-agency group that specified theNREN.

Bell also established the ACMGordon Bell Prize(administered by the ACM and IEEE) in 1987 to encourage development inparallel 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-processornCUBE 10hypercube.

He was a founding member ofArdent Computerin 1986, becoming VP of R&D in 1988, and remained until it merged withStellarin 1989, to becomeStardent Computer.

Microsoft Research

Between 1991 and 1995, Bell advisedMicrosoftin its efforts to start a research group, then joined it full-time in August 1995, studyingtelepresenceand related ideas.He was theexperiment subjectfor theMyLifeBitsproject, an experiment inlife-logging(not the same aslife-blogging).This was an attempt to fulfillVannevar 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.

Death

Bell died ofaspiration pneumoniaat his home inCoronado, California,on May 17, 2024. He was 89.

Bell's law of computer classes

Main article:Bell's law of computer classes

Bell's law of computer classeswas 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 newusually lower pricedclass 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(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","an architect of our digital age",and "father of the minicomputer".

Bell was elected a member of theNational Academy of Engineeringin 1977 for contributions to the architecture of minicomputers.He is also a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences(1994),American Association for the Advancement of Science(1983),Association for Computing Machinery(1994),IEEE(1974), and member of theNational Academy of Sciences(2007), and Fellow of theAustralian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering(2009).

He is also a member of the advisory board ofTTI/Vanguardand a former member of the Sector Advisory Committee of Australia's Information and Communication Technology Division of theCommonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

Bell was the first recipient of theIEEE John von Neumann Medal,in 1992.His other awards include Fellow of theComputer History Museum,theAeAInventor Award, the Vladimir Karapetoff Outstanding Technical Achievement Award ofEta Kappa Nu,and the 1991National Medal of Technologyby PresidentGeorge H. W. Bush.He was also named an Eta Kappa Nu Eminent Member in 2007.

In 1993,Worcester Polytechnic Instituteawarded Bell an Honorary Doctor of Engineering, and in 2010, Bell received an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree fromCarnegie Mellon University.The latter award referred to him as "the father of the minicomputer".

Bell co-foundedThe Computer Museumin Boston, Massachusetts, with his wifeGwen Bellin 1979. He was a founding board member of its successor, theComputer History Museumlocated inMountain 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".The story of the museum's evolution beginning in the early 1970s withKen OlsenatDigital Equipment Corporationis described in the Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR-2011-44, "Out of a Closet: The Early Years of The Computer [x]* Museum".A timeline of computing historical machines, events, and people is given on his website.It covers from prehistoric times to the present.

Books

• (withAllen Newell)Computer Structures: Readings and Examples(1971,ISBN0-07-004357-4)
• (with C. Mudge and J. McNamara)Computer Engineering(1978,ISBN0-932376-00-2)
• (with Dan Siewiorek and Allen Newell)Computer Structures: Principles and Examples(1982,ISBN0-07-057302-6)
• (with J. McNamara)High Tech Ventures: The Guide for Entrepreneurial Success(1991,ISBN0-201-56321-5)
• (with Jim Gemmell)Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution will Change Everything(2009,ISBN978-0-525-95134-6)
• (with Jim Gemmell)Your Life Uploaded: The Digital Way to Better Memory, Health, and Productivity(2010,ISBN978-0-452-29656-5)

See also

• MyLifeBits
• Microsoft SenseCam
• Lifelog

Further reading

• Wilkinson, Alec,"Remember This?"The New Yorker,28 May 2007, pp. 38–44.

External links

• CBS Evening News video interviewon the MyLifeBits Project, 2007.