C. Gordon Bell, a know-how visionary whose pc designs for Digital Tools Company fueled the emergence of the minicomputer business within the Sixties, died on Friday in Coronado, Calif. He was 89.
The trigger was pneumonia, his household mentioned in a press release.
Known as the “Frank Lloyd Wright of computer systems” by Datamation journal, Mr. Bell was the grasp architect within the effort to create smaller, inexpensive, interactive computer systems that could possibly be clustered right into a community. A virtuoso at pc structure, he constructed the primary time-sharing pc and championed efforts to construct the Ethernet. He was amongst a handful of influential engineers whose designs fashioned the very important bridge between the room-size fashions of the mainframe period and the arrival of the non-public pc.
After stints at a number of different startup ventures, he grew to become the pinnacle of the Nationwide Science Basis’s computer systems and data science and engineering group, the place he directed the trouble to hyperlink the world’s supercomputers right into a high-speed community that led on to the event of the fashionable web. He later joined Microsoft’s nascent analysis lab, the place he remained for about 20 years earlier than being named researcher emeritus.
In 1991, he was awarded the Nationwide Medal of Know-how and Innovation.
“His primary contribution was his imaginative and prescient of the longer term,” mentioned David Cutler, a senior technical fellow on the Microsoft Analysis Lab and a number one software program engineer, who labored with Mr. Bell at each Digital and Microsoft. “He all the time had a imaginative and prescient of the place computing was going to go. He helped make computing way more widespread and extra private.”
At a time when pc firms like IBM had been promoting multimillion-dollar mainframe computer systems, Digital Tools Company, which was based and run by Kenneth Olsen, geared toward introducing smaller, highly effective machines that could possibly be bought for a fraction of that value. Employed from the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how campus in 1960 as the corporate’s second pc engineer, Mr. Bell designed all its early entrants into what was then known as the minicomputer market.
The PDP-8, a 12-bit pc launched in 1965 with an $18,000 price ticket, was thought-about the primary profitable minicomputer available on the market. Extra essential, Digital Tools Company’s minicomputers had been bought to scientists, engineers and different customers who interacted immediately with the machines in an period when company computer systems had been off limits to such customers, housed in glass-walled information facilities underneath the watchful eye of specialists.
“All of the D.E.C. machines had been interactive, and we believed in having individuals speak on to computer systems,” Mr. Bell mentioned in a 1985 interview with Computerworld, an business publication. On this approach, Mr. Bell presaged the approaching private pc revolution.
Beneath the usually autocratic Mr. Olsen, the corporate was an engineering-oriented atmosphere wherein product traces drove the enterprise, consensus emerged after loud and sometimes caustic debate, and a matrixlike construction blurred the traces of administration. This managed chaos grew to become a supply of great stress for Mr. Bell; he typically butted heads with Mr. Olsen, who was identified for maintaining shut tabs on the work of his engineers, a lot to Mr. Bell’s chagrin.
Undone by the strain, Mr. Bell took what grew to become a six-year sabbatical to show at Carnegie Mellon College in Pittsburgh, however he returned to the corporate as vice chairman of engineering in 1972. Reinvigorated and brimming with new concepts, he oversaw the design of a wholly new pc structure. The VAX 780, a quick, highly effective and environment friendly minicomputer, was an enormous success, fueling gross sales that by the early Nineteen Eighties had made D.E.C. the world’s second-largest pc maker.
“Gordon Bell was a large within the pc business,” mentioned Howard Anderson, founding father of the Yankee Group, a know-how business analysis agency that tracked the market in that period. “I give him as a lot credit score for D.E.C.’s success as Ken Olsen. He believed within the primacy of engineering expertise, and he attracted a number of the greatest engineers within the business to D.E.C., which grew to become a spot of nice ferment.”
At D.E.C., the strain between Mr. Olsen and Mr. Bell once more grew to become insufferable. Confused by the strain to maintain turning out winners and by Mr. Olsen’s overbearing presence, Mr. Bell grew to become fast to anger (he was identified to throw erasers at individuals in conferences) and left his engineers indignant and confused. In March 1983, on a ski journey to Snowmass, Colo., along with his spouse and a number of other of the corporate’s high engineers, Mr. Bell suffered a large coronary heart assault in his ski chalet and might need died if not for the efforts of Bob Puffer, an organization vice chairman, who revived him with CPR.
After months of recuperation, he returned to work however determined it was time to go away for good. Over the protests of a number of high firm executives, he stop in the summertime of 1983.
Chester Gordon Bell was born on Aug. 19, 1934, in Kirksville, Mo., to Chester Bell, an electrician who owned an equipment retailer, and Lola Bell, who taught grade college.
He developed a congenital coronary heart drawback when he was 7 and spent a lot of the second grade at house, principally in mattress. He spent his confinement wiring circuits, working chemistry experiments and slicing out puzzles with a jigsaw. After he recovered, he spent numerous hours in his father’s store studying about electrical restore. By age 12, he was knowledgeable electrician — putting in the primary house dishwashers, fixing motors and tearing aside mechanical devices to rebuild them.
Mr. Bell graduated from M.I.T. in 1957 with a grasp’s diploma in electrical engineering. He then earned a Fulbright scholarship to the College of New South Wales in Australia the place he developed and taught the college’s first graduate course in pc design. Whereas there, he met Gwen Druyor, one other Fulbright scholar, whom he married and with whom he would discovered the Pc Historical past Museum in Boston. They later divorced.
Although he started work towards a Ph.D., Mr. Bell deserted that effort to hitch Digital Tools Company. He had little interest in analysis, believing that it was an engineer’s job to construct issues.
After he left the corporate, Mr. Bell was a founding father of each Encore Pc and Ardent Pc. In 1986, he delved into the world of public coverage when he joined the Nationwide Science Basis and led the supercomputer networking effort that resulted in an early iteration of the web known as the Nationwide Analysis and Training Community. In 1987, he sponsored the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for work in parallel computing.
He finally moved to California, the place he grew to become a Silicon Valley angel investor and, in 1991, an adviser to Microsoft, which was opening its first analysis lab in Redmond, Wash. Mr. Bell joined the Microsoft Analysis Silicon Valley Lab full time in 1995. There he labored on MyLifeBits, a database designed to seize all of his life’s data — articles, books, CDs, letters, emails, music, house films and movies — in a cloud-based digital database.
Mr. Bell is survived by his second spouse, Sheridan Sinclair-Bell; his son, Brigham, and his daughter, Laura Bell, each from his first marriage; his stepdaughter, Logan Forbes; his sister, Sharon Smith; and 4 grandchildren.
Within the 1985 Computerworld interview, Mr. Bell defined his formulation for repeated know-how successes. “The trick in any know-how,” he mentioned, “is figuring out when to get on the bandwagon, figuring out when to push for change, after which figuring out when it’s useless and time to get off.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
