C. Gordon Bell, a technology visionary whose computer designs for Digital Equipment Corporation fueled the emergence of the minicomputer industry in the 1960s, died Friday 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 of efforts to create smaller, affordable, networkable, interactive computers. A virtuoso in computer architecture, he built the first time-sharing computer and championed efforts to build the Ethernet. He was one of a handful of influential engineers whose designs provided the vital bridge between the room-sized designs of the mainframe era and the advent of the personal computer.
After working at several other startups, he became head of the National Science Foundation’s Computer Science and Engineering Group, where he led efforts to connect the world’s supercomputers into a high-speed network that led directly to the development of the modern computer. The Internet. He then joined Microsoft’s fledgling research lab, where he stayed for about 20 years before being named a distinguished researcher.
In 1991, he received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
“His biggest contribution was his vision for the future,” said David Cutler, a senior technical researcher at the Microsoft Research Lab and a leading software engineer who worked with Mr. Bell at Digital and Microsoft. “He always had a vision of where computing was going. “He helped make computing much more popular and more personal.”
At a time when computer companies like IBM were selling mainframe computers for several million dollars, Digital Equipment Corporation, founded and headed by Kenneth Olsen, aimed to introduce smaller, more powerful machines that could be purchased for a fraction of that cost. Hired on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960 as the company’s second computer engineer, Mr. Bell designed all the early entrants into what was then called the minicomputer market.
The PDP-8, a 12-bit computer introduced in 1965 at a price of $18,000, was considered the first successful minicomputer on the market. More importantly, Digital Equipment Corporation’s minicomputers were sold to scientists, engineers, and other users who interacted directly with the machines at a time when corporate computers were off-limits to these users, housed in centers of data to the glass walls under the watchful eye of specialists.
“All the DEC machines were interactive, and we believed in having people talk directly to computers,” Mr. Bell said in a 1985 interview with Computerworld, an industry publication. In this way, Mr. Bell presaged the coming personal computer revolution.
Under Mr. Olsen’s often autocratic leadership, the company was an engineering-driven environment in which product lines drove the business, consensus emerged after loud and often caustic debates, and a matrix-like structure blurred management lines. This controlled chaos became a source of enormous stress for Mr. Bell; he often clashed with Mr. Olsen, who was known to closely monitor the work of his engineers, much to Mr. Bell’s dismay.
Undone by the tension, Mr. Bell took what became a six-year sabbatical to teach at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but returned to the company as vice president of engineering in 1972. Invigorated and brimming with 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, fueling sales that by the early 1980s had made DEC the world’s second largest computer manufacturer.
“Gordon Bell was a giant of the computer industry,” said Howard Anderson, founder of the Yankee Group, a technology industry research firm that tracked the market at that time. “I give him as much credit for DEC’s success as Ken Olsen. “I believed in the primacy of talent in engineering and I attracted some of the best engineers in the industry to the DEC, which became a place of great excitement.”
At DEC, the tension between Mr. Olsen and Mr. Bell became unbearable again. Stressed by the pressure to continue producing winners and by Mr. Olsen’s overbearing presence, Mr. Bell quickly became angry (he was known to throw gum at people in meetings) and left his angry and confused engineers. 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 vice president of the company, who revived him with CPR.
After months of recovery, he returned to work but decided it was time to leave for good. Following protests from several senior company executives, he resigned in the summer of 1983.
Chester Gordon Bell was born on August 19, 1934, in Kirksville, Missouri, to Chester Bell, an electrician who owned an appliance store, and Lola Bell, who was an elementary school teacher.
He developed a congenital heart problem at age 7 and spent much of third grade at home, mostly in bed. He spent his confinement wiring circuits, carrying out chemistry experiments and cutting puzzles with a jigsaw. After his recovery, he spent countless hours in his father’s workshop learning about electrical repair. By the age of 12, he was a professional electrician – installing the first domestic dishwashers, repairing motors and dismantling mechanical gadgets to rebuild them.
Mr. Bell graduated from MIT in 1957 with a master’s degree in electrical engineering. He then earned 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 and with whom he founded the Computer History Museum in Boston. They later divorced.
Although he began working toward a doctorate, Mr. Bell abandoned his efforts to join Digital Equipment Corporation. He was not interested in research, believing that building things was an engineer’s job.
After leaving the company, Mr. Bell was a founder 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 resulted in an early iteration of the Internet called National Research and Education Network. In 1987 he sponsored the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for his work on parallel computing.
He eventually moved to California, where he became an angel investor in Silicon Valley and, in 1991, an advisor to Microsoft, which was opening its first research lab in Redmond, Washington. Mr. Bell joined the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Lab full-time in 1995. There he worked on MyLifeBits, a database designed to capture all of his life’s information (articles, books, CDs, letters, emails, music, home movies and videos) in a cloud-based digital database.
Mr. Bell is survived by his second wife, Sheridan Sinclair-Bell; his son, Brigham, and daughter, Laura Bell, both from his first marriage; his daughter-in-law, Logan Forbes; his sister, Sharon Smith; and four grandchildren.
In the 1985 Computerworld interview, Mr. Bell explained his formula for repeated technological success. “The secret of all technology,” he says, “is knowing when to jump on the bandwagon, knowing when to push for change, and then knowing when it’s dead and it’s time to get off. »
Alex Traub reports contributed.
