C. Gordon Bell, a expertise visionary whose pc designs for Digital Gear Company fueled the emergence of the minicomputer trade within the Sixties, died on Friday at his dwelling 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 may very well 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 important bridge between the room-size fashions of the mainframe period and the arrival of the private pc.
After stints at a number of different startup ventures, Mr. Bell grew to become the top of the Nationwide Science Basis’s computer systems and knowledge science and engineering group, the place he directed the hassle 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 principal contribution was his imaginative and prescient of the long run,” 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 at all times had a imaginative and prescient of the place computing was going to go. He helped make computing far more widespread and extra private.”
At a time when pc corporations like IBM have been promoting multimillion-dollar mainframe computer systems, Digital Gear Company, which was based and run by Kenneth Olsen, aimed toward introducing smaller, highly effective machines that may very well be bought for a fraction of that value. Mr. Bell was employed from the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how campus in 1960 as the corporate’s second pc engineer. He designed all its early entrants into what was then referred to as the minicomputer market.
The PDP-8, a 12-bit pc launched in 1965 with an $18,000 price ticket, was thought of the primary profitable minicomputer in the marketplace. Extra vital, Digital Gear Company’s minicomputers have been bought to scientists, engineers and different customers, who interacted straight with the machines in an period when company computer systems have been off limits to such customers, housed in glass-walled knowledge facilities underneath the watchful eye of specialists.
“All of the D.E.C. machines have been interactive, and we believed in having folks speak on to computer systems,” Mr. Bell mentioned in a 1985 interview with Computerworld, an trade publication. On this approach, he presaged the approaching private pc revolution.
Beneath the customarily autocratic Mr. Olsen, the corporate was an engineering-oriented setting during which 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 large stress for Mr. Bell; he usually butted heads with Mr. Olsen, who was recognized 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 vp of engineering in 1972. Reinvigorated and brimming with new concepts, he oversaw the design of a completely 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 Eighties had made D.E.C. the world’s second-largest pc maker.
“Gordon Bell was an enormous within the pc trade,” mentioned Howard Anderson, founding father of the Yankee Group, a expertise trade 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 trade 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. Harassed 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 recognized to throw erasers at folks in conferences) and left his engineers offended and confused. In March 1983, on a ski journey to Snowmass, Colo., together with his spouse and several other of the corporate’s prime engineers, Mr. Bell suffered an enormous coronary heart assault in his ski chalet and may need died if not for the efforts of Bob Puffer, an organization vp, who revived him with CPR.
After months of recuperation, Mr. Bell returned to work however determined it was time to depart for good. Over the protests of a number of prime 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 (Gordon) Bell, who taught grade college.
He developed a coronary heart drawback when he was 7 and spent a lot of the second grade at dwelling, principally in mattress. He spent his confinement wiring circuits, working chemistry experiments and reducing 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 dwelling 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 in 1959and with whom he would found the Digital Laptop Museum (now the Laptop Historical past Museum) in Boston in 1979. They divorced in 2002.
Although he returned to M.I.T. and labored towards a Ph.D., Mr. Bell deserted that effort to hitch Digital Gear 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 Laptop and Ardent Laptop. 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 referred to as the Nationwide Analysis and Schooling Community. In 1987, he sponsored the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for work in parallel computing.
He ultimately 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, dwelling motion pictures and movies — in a cloud-based digital database.
Mr. Bell is survived by his second spouse, Sheridan Sinclaire-Bell, whom he married in 2009; 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 method for repeated expertise successes. “The trick in any expertise,” he mentioned, “is understanding when to get on the bandwagon, understanding when to push for change, after which understanding when it’s useless and time to get off.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
