"VAX Man": Computer engineer Gordon Bell dies at the age of 89
The most reliable parts of a computer are the ones you leave out - an obituary on the death of Gordon Bell.
Gordon Bell died of pneumonia at the age of 89.
(Image: Queensland University of Technology, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons)
He was the "VAX man" who developed the microcomputer at DEC. He then sat on the advisory board that designed the US education and research network, now known as the Internet. He later founded a prize for parallel computers, which has since become something of an Oscar for high-performance computers. At the age of 72, he began digitizing his entire life at the rate of one megabyte per hour. Now Gordon Bell has died at the age of 89 on May 17 as a result of pneumonia.
Chester Gordon Bell was born on April 19, 1934 in Kirksville, Missouri. His father owned an electronics store and his mother was a teacher. The frequently sickly boy was brought up at home. At the age of five, he began helping to repair electrical appliances. In 1957, he graduated as an electronics engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and went to Australia, where he programmed the DEUCE (Digital Electronic Universal Computing Engine) computer imported from the UK.
"I will remain the VAX man for many"
After his return to MIT, he wanted to work on speech recognition systems when Ken Olsen brought him to the newly founded company Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). There he was involved in the development of the PDP-1, PDP-5 and PDP-11. After working at DEC, he taught computer design at Carnegie Mellon University for six years before returning to DEC in 1972 as head of system development. "I was the 'VAX Man' and will remain the VAX Man for many," he recalled in an interview with Computerworld. "IBM built computers that worked behind glass. The VAX computers were networked systems that had to hold their own in everyday environments." After suffering a heart attack, Gordon Bell retired from the stressful day-to-day business at DEC only to use the parts he and his wife Gwen had collected to build the first computer museum of its kind in Boston.
As an advisor to the National Science Foundation, he built up the foundation's computer department in the 1980s and eventually headed the planning group that was involved in the plans for a "National Research and Education Network" (NREN). At the same time, as part of his membership of the ACM and IEEE, he endowed the Gordon Bell Prize for Parallel Computing, which today is one of the most important prizes for advances in high-performance computing. Between 1991 and 1995, he advised Microsoft on the establishment of its research department, only to return to research at Microsoft in 1995.
Bill Gates contributes foreword to the book
He caused a sensation in 2000 with the "MyLifeBits" project, in which he digitized his entire life, armed with a scanner, shoulder camera and dictation machine. At one megabyte per hour, he soon reached one gigabyte per month. This "life logging" was an attempt to recreate Vannevar Bush's idea of a memex from 1945 using modern technology. All documents were digitized and every conversation recorded. The camera took a picture every 30 seconds. The project resulted in the book "Total Recall", for which Bill Gates contributed the foreword. If you like, you can see a relationship between the new Microsoft Recall approach and Bell's project.
Gordon Bell has received numerous prizes and awards. In 1991, US President George Bush awarded him the National Medal of Technology, and in 1992 he was the first recipient of the John von Neumann Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). As the "father of the minicomputer", he was awarded two honorary doctorates. "The thing is that 99 percent of this computer industry doesn't understand that the advances in technology are destroying the industry itself," he explained in an interview. This sentence later became "Bell's Law of computer classes".
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