Chester Gordon Bell (August 19, 1934 – May 17, 2024) was an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), from 1960 to 1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later served as the company's Vice President of Engineering from 1972 to 1983, overseeing development of the VAX computer systems. Bell's later career included roles as an entrepreneur, investor, founding Assistant Director of NSF's Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate from 1986 to 1987, and researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research from 1995 to 2015.
Early life and education Gordon Bell was born in Kirksville, Missouri. He grew up helping with the family business, Bell Electric, repairing appliances and wiring homes. Bell received a BS (1956), and MS (1957) in electrical engineering from MIT. He then went to the New South Wales University of Technology (now UNSW) in Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1957–58, where he taught classes on computer design, programmed one of the first computers to arrive in Australia (called UTECOM, an English Electric DEUCE), and published his first academic paper. Returning to the US, he worked in the MIT Speech Computation Laboratory under Professor Ken Stevens, where he wrote the first analysis by synthesis program.
Career
Digital Equipment Corporation The DEC founders Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson recruited him for their new company in 1960, where he designed the I/O subsystem of the PDP-1, including the first UART. Bell was the architect of the PDP-4, and PDP-6. Other architectural contributions were to the PDP-5 and PDP-11 Unibus and General Registers architecture. After DEC, Bell went to Carnegie Mellon University in 1966 to teach computer science. He returned to DEC in 1972 as vice-president of engineering, where he was in charge of the successful VAX computer.
Entrepreneur and policy advisor Bell reportedly later came to find work at DEC stressful, and suffered a heart attack in March 1983. After he recovered and shortly after he returned to work, he resigned from the company in the summer. Afterwards, he founded Encore Computer, 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, and led the cross-agency group that specified the NREN. Bell also established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize (administered by the ACM and IEEE) in 1987 to encourage development in parallel processing. 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 hypercube. He was a founding member of Ardent Computer in 1986, becoming VP of R&D in 1988, and remained until it merged with Stellar in 1989, to become Stardent Computer.
Microsoft Research Between 1991 and 1995, Bell advised Microsoft in its efforts to start a research group, then joined it full-time in August 1995, studying telepresence and related ideas. He was the experiment subject for the MyLifeBits project, an experiment in life-logging (not the same as life-blogging). This was an attempt to fulfill Vannevar Bush'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 digitized all documents he has read or produced, CDs, emails, and so on.
Death Bell died of aspiration pneumonia at his home in Coronado, California, on May 17, 2024. He was 89.
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), palmtop computing (1995), web services (2000s), 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.
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