Gordon Bell
Encyclopedia
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
(DEC) 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP
Programmed Data Processor
Programmed Data Processor was the name of a series of minicomputers made by Digital Equipment Corporation. The name 'PDP' intentionally avoided the use of the term 'computer' because, at the time of the first PDPs, computers had a reputation of being large, complicated, and expensive machines, and...
machines and later became Vice President of Engineering 1972-1983, overseeing the development of the VAX
VAX
VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...
. Bell's later career includes entrepreneur, investor, founding Assistant Director of NSF's Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate 1986-1987, and researcher at Microsoft Research, 1995–present.
Early life and education
Chester Gordon Bell was born in Kirksville, MissouriKirksville, Missouri
Kirksville is the county seat of Adair County, Missouri, United States. It is located in Benton Township. The population was 17,505 at the 2010 census. Kirksville also anchors a micropolitan area that comprises Adair and Schuyler counties. The city is perhaps best known as the location of Truman...
. He grew up helping with the family business, Bell Electric, repairing appliances and wiring homes.
Bell received a B.S.
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...
(1956), and M.S.
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
(1957) in electrical engineering
Electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...
from MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
. He then went to the university of New South Wales in Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship, where he taught classes on computer design, programmed one of the first computers to arrive in Australia (called the DEUCE) and published his first academic paper. Returning to the U.S., he worked in the MIT Speech Computation Laboratory under Professor Ken Stevens
Kenneth N. Stevens
Kenneth N. Stevens is Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT. Stevens heads the Speech Communication Group in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics , and is one of the world's leading scientists in...
, where he wrote the first Analysis by Synthesis program.
Digital Equipment Corporation
The DECDigital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
founders Ken Olsen
Ken Olsen
Kenneth Harry Olsen was an American engineer who co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957 with colleague Harlan Anderson.-Background:...
and Harlan Anderson
Harlan Anderson
Harlan Anderson is an engineer and entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation which at one time was the second largest computer company in the world. Other notable entities he has been associated with include Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of...
recruited him for their new company in 1960, where he designed the I/O
I/O
I/O may refer to:* Input/output, a system of communication for information processing systems* Input-output model, an economic model of flow prediction between sectors...
subsystem of the PDP-1
PDP-1
The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1960. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at MIT, BBN and elsewhere...
, including the first UART
Universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter
A universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter, abbreviated UART , is a type of "asynchronous receiver/transmitter", a piece of computer hardware that translates data between parallel and serial forms. UARTs are commonly used in conjunction with communication standards such as EIA RS-232, RS-422 or...
. Bell was the architect of the PDP-4
Programmed Data Processor
Programmed Data Processor was the name of a series of minicomputers made by Digital Equipment Corporation. The name 'PDP' intentionally avoided the use of the term 'computer' because, at the time of the first PDPs, computers had a reputation of being large, complicated, and expensive machines, and...
, and PDP-6
PDP-6
The PDP-6 was a computer model developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1963. It was influential primarily as the prototype for the later PDP-10; the instruction sets of the two machines are almost identical.The PDP-6 was DEC's first "big" machine...
. Other architectural contributions were to the PDP-5 and PDP-11
PDP-11
The PDP-11 was a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a succession of products in the PDP series. The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many real-time applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years...
Unibus
Unibus
The Unibus was the earliest of several computer bus technologies used with PDP-11 and early VAX systems manufactured by the Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts.-History:...
and General Registers architecture.
After DEC, Bell went to Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
in 1966 to teach computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
, but returned to DEC in 1972 as vice-president of engineering, where he was in charge of the VAX
VAX
VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...
, DEC's most successful computer.
Entrepreneur and policy advisor
Bell retired from DEC in 1983 as the result of a heart attackMyocardial infarction
Myocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...
, but soon after founded Encore Computer
Encore Computer
Encore Computer was an early pioneer in the parallel computing market, based in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Although offering a number of system designs beginning in 1985, they were never as well known as other companies in this field such as Pyramid Technology, Alliant, and the most similar...
, one of the first shared memory, multiple-microprocessor computers to use the snooping cache structure.
During the 1980s he became involved with public policy, becoming the first and founding Assistant Director of the CISE Directorate of the NSF
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
, and led the cross-agency group that specified the NREN
National Research and Education Network
A National Research and Education Network is a specialised internet service provider dedicated to supporting the needs of the research and education communities within a country....
.
Bell also established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize
Gordon Bell Prize
The Gordon Bell Prizes are a set of awards awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery in conjunction with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers each year at the Supercomputing Conference to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing applications...
(administered by the ACM and IEEE) in 1987 to encourage development in parallel processing
Parallel computing
Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently . There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level,...
. The first Gordon Bell Prize was won by researchers at the Parallel Processing Division of Sandia National Laboratory for work done on the 1000-processor nCUBE 10
NCUBE
nCUBE was a series of parallel computing computers from the company of the same name. Early generations of the hardware used a custom microprocessor...
hypercube
Hypercube
In geometry, a hypercube is an n-dimensional analogue of a square and a cube . It is a closed, compact, convex figure whose 1-skeleton consists of groups of opposite parallel line segments aligned in each of the space's dimensions, perpendicular to each other and of the same length.An...
.
He was a founding member of Ardent Computer
Ardent Computer
The Ardent Computer Corporation was a graphics minicomputer manufacturing company. The systems also used the Intel i860 as graphics co-processors. The company went through a series of mergers and re-organizations and changed names several times as their venture capital funders attempted to find a...
in 1986, becoming VP of R&D 1988, and remained until it merged with Stellar
Stellar
Stellar is an adjective referring to one or more stars. It may also refer to:* Hyundai Stellar, a car built by Hyundai Motor Company* "Stellar*", a New Zealand-based rock band.* "Stellar" , a song by Incubus...
in 1989, to become Stardent Computer.
Microsoft Research
Between 1991 and 1995, Bell advised MicrosoftMicrosoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
in its efforts to start a research group, then joined it full time in August 1995, where he still works (as of 2010), studying telepresence
Telepresence
Telepresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance of being present, or to have an effect, via telerobotics, at a place other than their true location....
and related ideas. He is the experiment subject for the MyLifeBits
MyLifeBits
MyLifeBits is a Microsoft Research project. It was inspired by Vannevar Bush's hypothetical Memex computer system. The project includes full-text search, text and audio annotations, and hyperlinks. The "experimental subject" of the project is computer scientist Gordon Bell, and the project will...
project, an experiment in life-logging (not the same as life-blogging
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
) and an attempt to fulfill Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
's vision of an automated store of the documents, pictures (including those taken automatically), and sounds an individual has experienced in his lifetime, to be accessed with speed and ease. For this, Bell has digitized all documents he has read or produced, CDs, emails, and so on. He continues to do so, gathering web pages browsed, phone and instant messaging conversations and the like more or less automatically. The Dutton book, Total Recall, describes the vision and implications for a personal, lifetime e-memory for recall, work, health, education, and immortality.
Total Recall is published in paperback as Your Life Uploaded: The Digital Way to Better Memory, Health, and Productivity.
Honors
Bell is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and SciencesAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
(1994), American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...
(1983), Association for Computing Machinery
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
(1994), IEEE (1974), and member of the National Academy of Engineering
National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...
(1977), National Academy of Science (2007), and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering
Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering
The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering is an independent non-government organization dedicated to the promotion in Australia of scientific and engineering knowledge to practical purposes. Professor Robin Batterham is the current President of ATSE....
(2009).
He is also a member of the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard
TTI/Vanguard
TTI/Vanguard is an advanced technology conference series for senior-level executives. Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, TTI/Vanguard explores emerging and potentially disruptive technologies and their global impact. Five times annually, corporate and government leaders, entrepreneurs,...
and a member of the Sector Advisory Committee of Australia's Information and Communication Technology Division of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.
Bell was the first recipient of the IEEE John von Neumann Medal
IEEE John von Neumann Medal
The IEEE John von Neumann Medal was established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 1990 and may be presented annually "for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology." The achievements may be theoretical, technological, or entrepreneurial, and need not have been made...
, in 1992. His other awards include Fellow of the Computer History Museum
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on our lives.-History:The museum's origins...
, honorary D. Eng. from WPI
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Worcester Polytechnic Institute is a private university located in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the United States.Founded in 1865 in Worcester, WPI was one of the United States' first engineering and technology universities...
, the AeA
AeA
The AeA was a nationwide non-profit trade association that represented all segments of the technology industry...
Inventor Award, the Vladimir Karapetoff Outstanding Technical Achievement Award of Eta Kappa Nu
Eta Kappa Nu
Eta Kappa Nu is the electrical and computer engineering honor society of the IEEE, founded in October 1904 by Maurice L. Carr at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The organization currently has around 200 student chapters and about 3,000,000 members and is headquartered in Chicago,...
, and the 1991 National Medal of Technology
National Medal of Technology
The National Medal of Technology and Innovation is an honor granted by the President of the United States to American inventors and innovators who have made significant contributions to the development of new and important technology...
by President George H.W. Bush. He was also named an Eta Kappa Nu Eminent Member in 2007.
In 2010, Bell received an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree from Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
. The university referred to him as "the father of the minicomputer".
Bell co-founded The Computer Museum
The Computer Museum, Boston
The Computer Museum was a Boston, Massachusetts museum that opened in 1979 and operated in three different locations until 1999. It was once referred to as TCM and is sometimes called the Boston Computer Museum....
, Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife Gwen Bell
Gwen Bell
Gwen Bell was the first president of The Computer Museum in Boston, which she co-founded with her husband Gordon Bell.Career:*Fulbright Scholar at the Sydney University School of Architecture, Design, and Planning...
in 1979. He was a founding board member of its successor, the Computer History Museum
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on our lives.-History:The museum's origins...
, Mountain View, California
Mountain View, California
-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...
, in 1999 and was inducted as a Museum Fellow in 2003. The story of the museum's evolution beginning in the early 1970s with Ken Olsen
Ken Olsen
Kenneth Harry Olsen was an American engineer who co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957 with colleague Harlan Anderson.-Background:...
at Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
is described in the Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR-2011-44, "Out of a Closet: The Early Years of The Computer [x]* Museum". A timeline of computing historical machines, events, and people is given on his website. It covers from B.C. to the present.
Bell's Law of Computer Classes
Bell's Law of Computer Classes was first described in 1972 with the emergence of a new, lower priced microcomputer class based on the microprocessor. Established market class computers are introduced at a constant price with increasing functionality and performance. Technology advances in semiconductors, storage, interfaces and networks enable a new computer class (platform) to form about every decade to serve a new need. Each new usually lower priced class is maintained as a quasi independent industry (market). Classes include: mainframes (1960s), minicomputers (1970s), networked workstations and personal computers (1980s), browser-web-server structure (1990s), web services (2000s), palm computing (1995), convergence of cell phones and computers (2003), and Wireless Sensor Networks aka motes (2004). Bell predicted that home and body area networks would form by 2010.Books
- (with Allen NewellAllen NewellAllen Newell was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology...
) Computer Structures: Readings and Examples (1971, ISBN 07-004357-4) - (with C. Mudge and J. McNamara) Computer Engineering (1978, ISBN 0-932376-00-2)
- (with Dan Siewiorek and Allen Newell) Computer Structures: Readings and Examples (1982, ISBN 0-07-057302-6)
- (with J. McNamara) High Tech Ventures: The Guide for Entrepreneurial Success (1991, ISBN 0-201-56321-5)
- (with Jim Gemmell) Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution will Change Everything (2009, ISBN 978-0525951346)
- (with Jim Gemmell) Your Life Uploaded: The Digital Way to Better Memory, Health, and Productivity (2010, ISBN 978-0452296565)
Quotes
From Computer World "VAX Man" interview, June 1992.- "Microsoft NT...is going to be very far-reaching. It's going to grab the rug out from under UnixUnixUnix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
." - "In 10 years, you'll see 99% of the hardware and software systems sold through what are fundamentally retail stores."
- "Twenty-five years from now...Computers will be exactly like telephones. They are probably going to be communicating all the time ... I would hope that by the year 2000 there is this big [networking] infrastructure, giving us arbitrary bandwidth on a pay-as-you-go basis."
- "Somebody once said, 'He's never wrong about the future, but he does tend to be wrong about how long it takes.' "
Some of his classic sayings while working at DEC:
- "The most reliable components are the ones you leave out."
At the February 10, 1982 Ethernet Announcement at The World Trade Center with Bob Noyce of Intel and David Liddle of Xerox, he stated:
- "A Broadband Cable for TV is like a sewer pipe that in principle can carry gas, water, and waste: it is easy to get all that shit in there, but hard to separate it out again."
- "Ethernet is the UART of the 1980s."
- "... the network becomes the system."
Further reading
- Wilkinson, Alec, "Remember This?" The New YorkerThe New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, 28 May 2007, pp. 38–44.
External links
- Gordon Bell homepage at Microsoft ResearchMicrosoft ResearchMicrosoft Research is the research division of Microsoft created in 1991 for developing various computer science ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs Turing Award winners C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson, and Charles P...
- Interview by David K. Allison, Curator, National Museum of American HistoryNational Museum of American HistoryThe National Museum of American History: Kenneth E. Behring Center collects, preserves and displays the heritage of the United States in the areas of social, political, cultural, scientific and military history. Among the items on display are the original Star-Spangled Banner and Archie Bunker's...
, USA, 1995. - CBS Evening News video interview on the MyLifeBits Project, 2007.