C. Gordon Bell, a technology visionary whose computer designs for Digital Equipment Corporation spurred the emergence of the minicomputer industry in the 1960s, died Friday at his home in Coronado, California. He was 89 years old.
The cause was pneumonia, his family said in a statement.
Dubbed the “Frank Lloyd Wright of computers” by Datamation magazine, Mr. Bell was the master architect in developing smaller, affordable, interactive computers that could be networked together. A virtuoso of computer architecture, he built the first time-sharing computer and championed the development of Ethernet. He was one of a handful of influential engineers whose designs formed the crucial bridge between the spatial models of the mainframe era and the advent of the personal computer.
After stints at several other start-up companies, Mr. Bell became head of the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Group, where he led efforts to connect the world’s supercomputers in a high-speed network, leading directly to the development of led the modern Internet. He later joined Microsoft’s newly formed research laboratory, where he remained for about 20 years before being named researcher emeritus.
In 1991 he was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
“His main contribution was his vision for the future,” said David Cutler, a senior technical fellow at the Microsoft Research Lab and a leading software engineer who worked with Mr. Bell at both Digital and Microsoft. “He always had an idea of where computer science would develop. He helped make computing much more widespread and personal.”
At a time when computer companies like IBM were selling multimillion-dollar mainframe computers, Digital Equipment Corporation, founded and led by Kenneth Olsen, aimed to introduce smaller, powerful machines that could be purchased for a fraction of that cost. Mr. Bell was hired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in 1960 as the company’s second computer engineer. He designed all of the early entrants in what was then called minicomputers.
The PDP-8, a 12-bit computer introduced in 1965 and priced at $18,000, was considered the first successful minicomputer on the market. More importantly, Digital Equipment Corporation’s minicomputers were sold directly to scientists, engineers, and other users at a time when corporate computers were off-limits to such users and housed in glass-walled data centers under the watchful eye of specialists interacted with the machines.
“All DEC machines were interactive, and we believed that people should talk directly to computers,” Mr. Bell said in a 1985 interview with Computerworld, an industry publication. In this way he announced the coming PC revolution.
Under the often autocratic Mr. Olsen, the company was a technology-driven environment where product lines drove business, consensus emerged after loud and often caustic debate, and a matrix-like structure blurred management boundaries. This controlled chaos became a source of enormous stress for Mr. Bell; He often clashed with Mr. Olsen, who was known for closely monitoring the work of his engineers, much to Mr. Bell’s chagrin.
Disappointed by the excitement, Mr. Bell took a six-year sabbatical to teach at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but returned to the company in 1972 as vice president of engineering. Reinvigorated and full of new ideas, he oversaw the design of an entirely new computer architecture: the VAX 780, a fast, powerful and efficient minicomputer, was a huge success and increased sales, making DEC the second largest computer manufacturer in the world by the early 1980s.
“Gordon Bell was a giant in the computer industry,” said Howard Anderson, founder of the Yankee Group, a technology industry research firm that monitored the market during that time. “I give him as much credit for DEC’s success as Ken Olsen. He believed in the primacy of engineering talent and attracted some of the best engineers in the industry to DEC, which became a place of great excitement.”
At DEC, the tension between Mr. Olsen and Mr. Bell once again became unbearable. Stressed by the pressure to keep producing winners and by Mr. Olsen’s overbearing presence, Mr. Bell quickly flew into a rage (he was known to throw erasers at people in meetings), leaving his engineers angry and confused. In March 1983, while on a ski trip to Snowmass, Colorado, with his wife and several of the company’s top engineers, Mr. Bell suffered a massive heart attack at his ski lodge and might have died without the efforts of Bob Puffer. a company vice president who revived him with CPR.
After months of recovery, Mr Bell returned to work but decided it was time to leave for good. He resigned in the summer of 1983 due to protests from several of the company’s top managers.
Chester Gordon Bell was born on August 19, 1934 in Kirksville, Missouri, to Chester Bell, an electrician who owned an appliance store, and Lola (Gordon) Bell, an elementary school teacher.
When he was seven, he developed a congenital heart problem and spent much of second grade at home, mostly in bed. He spent his imprisonment wiring circuits, conducting chemistry experiments and cutting out puzzles with a jigsaw. After recovering, he spent countless hours in his father’s workshop learning about repairing electrical appliances. By age 12, he was a professional electrician – installing the first household dishwashers, repairing motors and disassembling mechanical devices to reassemble them.
Mr. Bell graduated from MIT in 1957 with a master’s degree in electrical engineering. He then received a Fulbright Scholarship to the University of New South Wales in Australia, where he developed and taught the university’s first graduate course in computer design. There he met Gwen Druyor, another Fulbright scholar, whom he married in 1979 and with whom he founded the Computer History Museum in Boston in 1996. They divorced in 2002.
Although he returned to MIT and worked toward a doctorate, Mr. Bell gave up that attempt and joined Digital Equipment Corporation. He had no interest in research and believed that an engineer’s job was to build things.
After leaving the company, Mr. Bell was one of the founders of Encore Computer and Ardent Computer. In 1986, he immersed himself in the world of public policy when he joined the National Science Foundation and led the supercomputer networking effort that led to an early version of the Internet called the National Research and Education Network. In 1987 he sponsored the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for work in parallel computing.
He eventually moved to California, where he became an angel investor in Silicon Valley and, in 1991, an advisor to Microsoft, which opened its first research laboratory in Redmond, Washington. Mr. Bell joined the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Lab full-time in 1995 where he worked on MyLifeBits, a database that contains all of the information in his life – articles, books, CDs, letters, emails, music, home movies and videos – in a cloud-based digital database should capture.
Mr. Bell is survived by his second wife, Sheridan Sinclaire-Bell, whom he married in 2009; his son Brigham and daughter Laura Bell, both from his first marriage; his stepdaughter, Logan Forbes; his sister, Sharon Smith; and four grandchildren.
In the 1985 Computerworld interview, Mr. Bell explained his recipe for repeated technology success. “The trick with any technology,” he said, “is knowing when to get on the bandwagon, when to push for change, and then knowing when it’s dead and it’s time to get off.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
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2024-05-22 02:01:26
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