C. Gordon Bell, a technology pioneer who helped design computers for the Digital Equipment Corporation that spurred the emergence of the minicomputer industry in the 1960s, died Friday at age 89 at his home in Coronado, California. .
The cause of death was pneumonia, his family said in a statement.
Mr. Bell, called “the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers” by Datamation magazine, was the master architect of efforts to create smaller, cheaper interactive computers that could be clustered on networks. A master of computer architecture, he created the first time-sharing computer and championed efforts to build Ethernet. He was one of a handful of influential engineers whose designs formed an important bridge between the room-size model of the mainframe era and the advent of the personal computer.
After working at several other startup ventures, Mr. Bell became director of the National Science Foundation’s Computer, Information Sciences, and Engineering Group. There he led efforts to connect supercomputers around the world into high-speed networks, which directly led to the development of: Modern Internet. He later joined Microsoft’s early research labs, where he worked for about 20 years before being named an emeritus research fellow.
In 1991, he received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
“His main contribution was his vision for the future,” said David Cutler, senior technical fellow at Microsoft Research Lab and a leading software engineer who worked with Bell at Digital and Microsoft. “He always had a vision of where computing was going. He helped make computing much more widespread and more personal.”
At a time when computer companies like IBM were selling multi-million dollar mainframe computers, Digital Equipment Corporation, founded and run by Kenneth Olsen, aimed to release smaller, more powerful computers that could be purchased at a fraction of that cost. Mr. Bell was hired as the company’s second computer engineer in 1960 on the MIT campus. He designed all of his early entrants into what was then called the minicomputer market.
The PDP-8, a 12-bit computer released 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 to scientists, engineers, and other users. They interacted directly with machines in an era when corporate computers were housed in glass-walled data centers under expert watch and inaccessible to these users.
Mr. Bell said in a 1985 interview with the industry publication Computerworld: “All DEC machines were interactive, and we believed that people could talk directly to the computers. In this way, he foreshadowed the coming personal computer revolution.
Under the often autocratic Mr. Olsen, the company was an engineering-centric environment where product lines drove the business, consensus was reached after loud and often acrimonious debates, and matrix-like structures blurred management boundaries. This controlled chaos was a source of great stress for Mr. Bell. He is often known to closely monitor the work of his engineers, Mr. butted heads with Olsen, much to Mr. Bell’s chagrin.
Overcoming the strain, Mr. Bell took a six-year sabbatical to teach at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. However, in 1972 he returned to the company as Vice President of Engineering. With his renewed energy and full of new ideas, he oversaw the design. A completely new computer architecture: A fast, powerful, and efficient minicomputer, the VAX 780 was a huge success and made DEC the world’s second largest computer manufacturer by the early 1980s.
“Gordon Bell was a giant in the computer industry.” said Howard Anderson, founder of Yankee Group, a technology industry research firm that tracked the market at the time. “I give him as much credit for DEC’s success as Ken Olsen. He believed that engineering talent was a priority, and he brought the best engineers in the industry to DEC, which became a place of great turbulence.”
At DEC, tensions between Mr. Olsen and Mr. Bell once again became unbearable. Mr. Bell, stressed by the pressure to keep winning and Mr. Olsen’s overbearing presence, quickly lost his temper (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 in his ski chalet, and but for the efforts of Bob Puffer, he may have died. There was. The company vice president saved him with CPR.
After months of recovery, Mr Bell returned to work but decided it was time to leave for good. After protests from some top executives, he quit 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 (Gordon) Bell, who taught elementary school.
He developed a congenital heart disease at age 7 and spent most of his second year at home, usually in bed. He spent his time in prison wiring circuits, doing chemistry experiments, and doing puzzles. After he recovered, he spent countless hours learning about electrical repairs in his father’s shop. By the age of 12, he had become a professional electrician. He installed the first home dishwasher, repaired motors, and disassembled and reassembled mechanical devices.
Mr. Bell earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1957. He then received a Fulbright Scholarship at 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 who founded the Computer History Museum in Boston in 1996. They divorced in 2002.
Although he returned to MIT and worked to earn a doctorate, Mr. Bell abandoned that effort to join Digital Equipment Corporation. He had no interest in research because he believed it was an engineer’s job to build things.
After leaving the company, Mr. Bell was the founder of Encore Computer and Ardent Computer. In 1986, he delved into the world of public policy when he joined the National Science Foundation, where he led the supercomputer networking effort that resulted in an early iteration of the Internet, the National Research and Education Network. In 1987, he sponsored the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for research in the field of parallel computing.
He eventually moved to California, became an angel investor in Silicon Valley, and in 1991 became an advisor to Microsoft as it opened its first research lab in Redmond, Washington. Mr. Bell joined Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Lab full-time in 1995. There he worked on MyLifeBits, a database designed to collect all of your life’s information – articles, books, CDs, letters, emails, music, home movies, videos – into a cloud-based digital database.
Mr. Bell is survived by his second wife, Sheridan Sinclaire-Bell, whom he married in 2009. His son Brigham and his daughter Laura Bell were both from his first marriage. his stepdaughter, Logan Forbes; his sister, Sharon Smith; and four grandchildren.
In a 1985 Computerworld interview, Mr. Bell described his formula for repeatable technological success. “The secret to any technology is knowing when to jump on the bandwagon, when to push for change, and when it’s time to call it a day and get out,” he said.
Alex Traub contributed to the report.
