Bell, C. Gordon American Computer Engineer and Designer

Bell, C. Gordon

1934 -

American, Computer Engineer, Computer Designer

Chester Gordon Bell (also known as Gordon Bennet Bell) was born August 19, 1934, in Kirksville, Missouri. C. Gordon Bell is an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of America.As a young boy Bell worked in his father’s electrical contracting business, learning to repair appliances and wire circuits. This work led naturally to an interest in electronics, and Bell studied electrical engineering at MIT, earning a B.S. in 1956 and an M.S. in 1957. After graduation and a year spent as a Fulbright Scholar in Australia, Bell worked in the MIT Speech Computation Laboratory (see speech recognition and synthesis ). In 1960 he was invited to join the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) by founders Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson. Bell was a key architect of DEC’s revolutionary PDP series (see minicomputer ), particularly as designer of the input/output (I/O) hardware in the PDP-1 and the multi- tasking PDP-6. Bell left DEC to teach computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (1966–72), but then returned to DEC until his retirement in 1983 following a heart attack. During this time Bell developed a deployment plan for the new VAX series minicomputers, which were data-process- ing workhorses in many organizations during the 1970s and 1980s. As a close observer of the computer industry, Bell formu- lated “Bell’s Law of Computer Classes” in 1972. It basically states that as new technologies (such as the microproces- sor) emerge, they result about once a decade in the emer- gence of new “classes” or computing platforms, each being generally cheaper and being perceived as a distinct product with new applications. Within a given class, price tends to hold constant while performance increases. Examples thus far include mainframes, minicomputers, personal comput- ers and workstations, networks, cluster or grid comput- ing, and today’s ubiquitously connected wireless, portable devices. Bell has indeed suggested that the trend to ubiqui- tous computing will continue (see ubiquitous computing and wearable computers ). After retirement Bell soon became active again. He founded Encore Computer, a company that specialized in multiprocessor computers, and later was a founding member of Ardent Computer as well as participating in the estab- lishment of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, a consortium that attempted to be America’s answer to a surging competitive threat from Japanese com- panies. Bell was also active in debates over technology pol- icy, playing an instrumental role as an assistant director in the National Science Foundation’s computing initiatives and the early adoption of the Internet. In 1987 Bell estab- lished the Gordon Bell Prize for achievements in parallel processing. Bell began the 1990s in a new role, helping Microsoft develop a research group, where he was still working as of 2008. Here Bell has developed what amounts to a new para- digm for managing personal data, a project called MyLife- Bits. Its main idea is that pictures, e-mails, documents, and other materials that are important to a person’s life and work should be organized according to their chronological and other relationships so they can be retrieved naturally and virtually automatically, eschewing the often arbitrary conventions of traditional file systems and interfaces. In 1992 Bell presciently told a Computer World interviewer that “twenty-five years from now . . . computers will be exactly like telephones. They are probably going to be com- municating all the time.” Bell also retains a strong interest in the history of com- puting. He cofounded the Computer History Museum in Boston in 1979 and was also a founder of its successor, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Bell is a distinguished member of the American Acad- emy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Elec- tronic Engineering (IEEE). His awards include the IEEE Von Neumann Medal, the AEA Inventor Award, and the National Medal of Technology (1991).

References:

• Gordon Bell Home Page. Microsoft Bay Area Research Center. Available online. URL: http://research.microsoft.com/users/ gbell/. Accessed April 30, 2007.
• Slater, Robert. Portraits in Silicon. Boston: MIT Press, 1987. “Vax Man: Gordon Bell.” Computerworld, June 22, 1992, p. 13. Available online. URL: http://research.microsoft.com/~gbell// CGB%20Files/Computerworld%20Vax%20Ma n%20920622% 20c.pdf. Accessed April 30, 2007.

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