C. Gordon Bell, creator of the personal computer prototype, dies at age 89

C. Gordon Bell, the technology visionary whose Digital Equipment Corporation computer designs helped spur the emergence of the minicomputer industry in the 1960s, died Friday at his home in Coronado, California. He was 89 years old.

The cause of death was pneumonia, the family said in a statement.

Dubbed by Datamation magazine as the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers, Bell was a designer who helped create small, affordable, interactive computers that could be clustered into networks. Computers A master of architecture, he developed the first time-sharing computers and led efforts to build the Ethernet. He was one of a handful of influential engineers whose designs served as an important bridge between the room-sized models of the mainframe era and the emergence of personal computers.

After working at several other start-up companies, Mr. Bell became director of the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Group, where he led efforts to connect supercomputers around the world into high-speed networks and directly led to the development of high-speed networks. modern internet. He then joined Microsoft's fledgling research lab and remained there for about 20 years until he was named a research fellow emeritus.

In 1991, he was awarded the National Technological Innovation Medal.

David Cutler, a senior technical fellow at Microsoft Research and a leading software engineer who worked with Bell at both Digital and Microsoft, said Bell's greatest contribution was his vision for the future. Cutler always had a vision for the future of computing. Mr. Cutler helped make computing 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, was developing small, powerful computers that could be purchased for a fraction of the cost. I was looking to install a machine. Mr. Bell was hired by the company from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in 1960 as his second computer engineer. He designed all of the early entrants into what was then called the minicomputer market.

The PDP-8 was a 12-bit computer released in 1965 at a price of $18,000 and was considered the first successful minicomputer on the market. More importantly, Digital Equipment Corporation's minicomputers were sold to scientists, engineers, and other users at a time when corporate computers were off-limits to such users, and they were installed under expert supervision under glass. was stored in the data center.

All DEC machines were interactive, believing that humans could talk directly to computers, Bell said in a 1985 interview with industry publication Computerworld. In this way, he foresaw the coming personal computer revolution.

Under Mr. Olsen, who was often autocratic, the company was an engineering-heavy environment, where product lines drove business, consensus was formed after noisy and acrimonious discussions, and a matrix-like structure. As a result, the boundaries of management have become blurred. This controlled chaos became a source of great stress for Mr. Bell. Mr. Bell often clashed with Mr. Olsen, who was known for his meticulous work as an engineer, much to his embarrassment.

Tensions thawed, and Bell took a six-year leave of absence 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 introduction of the VAX 780, a fast, powerful, and efficient minicomputer, which was a huge success, increasing sales and 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 Yankee Group, a technology industry research firm that studied the market at the time. When it comes to DEC's success, Ken he rates him as highly as Olsen. He believed in the superiority of engineering talent and attracted the best engineers in the industry to his DEC, which became a great breeding ground.

At DEC, tensions between Olsen and Bell again became unbearable. Stressed by the pressure to keep producing winners and Olsen's overbearing presence, Bell became easily irritable (he was known to throw erasers at people during meetings), making engineers angry and confused. In March 1983, during a ski trip to Snowmass, Colorado, with his wife and several of the company's top engineers, Bell suffered a massive heart attack at the ski lodge and might have died but for the efforts of Bob Puffer. A company vice president revived him with CPR.

After several months of recuperation, Mr. Bell returned to work, but decided it was time to retire for good. He resigned in the summer of 1983 after protests from several company executives.

Chester Gordon Bell was born on August 19, 1934 in Kirksville, Missouri, to Chester Bell, an electrician who owned an electronics store, and Laura (Gordon) Bell, an elementary school teacher.

He was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect when he was 7 years old, and spent most of his sophomore year at home, mostly in bed. He spent his time in confinement wiring circuits, conducting chemical experiments, and cutting puzzles with a jigsaw. After his recovery, he spent countless hours at his father's shop learning about electrical repair. By the age of 12, he had become a professional electrician, installing his first home dishwasher, repairing motors, and disassembling and rebuilding mechanical devices.

Mr. Bell graduated from MIT in 1957 with a master's degree in electrical engineering. He then won a Fulbright Scholarship to attend the University of New South Wales in Australia, where he developed and taught the first graduate course in computer design. While there, he meets and marries another Fulbright scholar, Gwen Druyol, with whom he ends up founding the Computer History Museum in Boston. They divorced in 2002.

Mr. Bell returned to MIT and pursued a Ph.D., but abandoned that pursuit and joined Digital Equipment Corporation. He had no interest in research and believed that an engineer's job was to create things.

After leaving the company, Mr. Bell became the founder of both Encore Computer and Ardent Computer. In 1986 he joined the National Science Foundation, delving deeper into the world of public policy and creating a supercomputer that led to the early stages of the Internet called the National Research and Education Network, where he led a networking effort. In 1987, he had the ACM Gordon sponsored his Bell Prize for research in parallel computing.

Mr. Bell eventually moved to California, where he became a Silicon Valley angel investor and, in 1991, an advisor to Microsoft, which opened its first research lab in Redmond, Washington. Mr. Bell joined Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Labs full-time in 1995, where he stored information about his life, including articles, books, CDs, letters, emails, music, home movies, and videos, all in a cloud-based digital format. Worked on MyLifeBits, a database designed to populate databases.

Mr Bell is survived by his second wife, Sheridan Sinclair 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 interview with Computerworld, Mr. Bell laid out his formula for repeating technology successes. The trick in any technology, he said, is knowing when to jump on the bandwagon, when to push for change, and knowing when the fad is over and it's time to get off.

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

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