C. Gordon Bell (August 19, 1934) is a leading computer engineer and manager, an early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) who designed several of their PDP machines and later rose to Vice President of Engineering and oversaw the development of the VAX. August 19 is the 231st day of the year (232nd in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1934 (MCMXXXIV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... Computer Engineering (also sometimes called Computer Systems Engineering) is a specialised discipline that combines electrical engineering and computer science. ... Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ... Programmed Data Processor (abbreviated PDP) was the name of a series of computers, several of them ground-breaking and very influential, made by Digital Equipment Corporation. ... This article is about the computing term VAX, not to be confused with the vacuum cleaner/floorcare manufacturer Vax. ...

Career

Born in Kirksville, Missouri, he received a B.S. (1956), and M.S. (1957) in electrical engineering from MIT. After a Fulbright Scholarship to Australia, he worked in the MIT Speech Computation Laboratory under Professor Ken Stevens, where he wrote the first Analysis-By-Synthesis program. 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 and PDP-5 and 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. Kirksville is a city located in Adair County, Missouri. ... A Bachelor of Science (B.S., B.Sc. ... 1956 (MCMLVI) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A masters degree is an academic degree usually awarded for completion of a postgraduate (or graduate) course of one to three years in duration. ... 1957 (MCMLVII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article treats electronics engineering as a subfield of electrical engineering, though this is not typical use in some areas. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a private research university located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Its mission and culture are guided by an emphasis on teaching and research grounded in practical applications of science and technology. ... Kenneth N. Stevens is Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT. Professor Stevens heads the Speech Communication Group in MITs Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and is one of the worlds leading scientists in acoustic phonetics. ... Ken Olsen calling UNIX snake oil Kenneth H. Olsen (born on February 20, 1926) is an American engineer who cofounded Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957 with colleague Harlan Anderson. ... Harlan Anderson (born 1929) is an engineer and entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). ... 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1960 calendar). ... This article is about the computer interface. ... The PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) was the first computer in Digital Equipments PDP series and was first produced in 1960. ... PDP is also used as an acronym for Plasma Display Panel. ... Programmed Data Processor (abbreviated PDP) was the name of a series of computers, several of them ground-breaking and very influential, made by Digital Equipment Corporation. ... The PDP-6 (Programmed Data Processor-6) was a computer model developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1963. ... PDP is also used as an acronym for Plasma Display Panel. ... The PDP-11 was a 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corp. ...

After DEC, Bell went to Carnegie Mellon University in 1966 to teach computer science, but returned to DEC in 1972 as vice-president of engineering, where he was in charge of the VAX, DEC's most successful computer. Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ... 1966 (MCMLXVI) was a common year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1966 calendar). ... Computer science, or computing science, is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. ... 1972 (MCMLXXII) was a leap year starting on Saturday. ...

Bell retired from DEC in 1983 as the result of a heart attack, but soon after founded Encore Computer, one of the first shared memory, multiple microprocessors to use the snooping cache structure. During the 1980s he became involved with public policy, becoming the first, Assistant Director of the CISE directorate of the NSF, and led the cross-agency group that specified the NREN aka the Internet. He also established the IEEE Gordon Bell Prize 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 nCUBE 10 hypercube. 1983 (MCMLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A myocardial infarction occurs when an atherosclerotic plaque slowly builds up in the inner lining of a coronary artery and then suddenly ruptures, totally occluding the artery and preventing blood flow downstream. ... Encore Computer was an early pioneer in the parallel computing market base in Marlboro MA. They offered a number of designs starting in 1985, they were never as well known as the other pioneers of this field, namely Pyramid, Alliant and Sequent. ... The 1980s decade refers to the years from 1980 to 1989, inclusive, informally sometimes including the years 1979, 1990 and 1991. ... The logo of the National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. ... A National Research & Education Network (NREN) is a specialised Internet Service Provider dedicated to supporting the needs of the research and education communities within a country. ... // Gordon Bell Prizes The Gordon Bell Prizes are a set of awards that were established in 1987. ... 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Parallel computing is the simultaneous execution of the same task (split up and specially adapted) on multiple processors in order to obtain results faster. ... The correct title of this article is nCUBE. The initial letter is capitalized due to technical restrictions. ... In geometry, the tesseract, or hypercube, is a regular, convex polychoron with eight cubical cells. ...

He was a founding member of Ardent Computer in 1986, becoming VP of R&D 1988, and remained until it merged with Stellar in 1989. The Ardent Computer Corporation was a graphics minicomputer manufacturing company, one of a very few 3rd parties to base their designs on the MIPS CPUs and the associated MIPS OS, using additional Intel i860s as graphics co-processors. ... 1986 (MCMLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1988 (MCMLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Look up stellar in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Between 1991 and 1995 Bell advised Microsoft in its efforts to start a research group, then joined it full time, where he still works (2005), studying telepresence and related ideas. He is the experiment subject for the MyLifeBits project, an attempt to fulfill Vannevar Bush's vision of an automated store of the documents, pictures 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. Currently he continues to do so, gathering web-browsing statistics, phone and instant messaging conversations and the like more or less automatically. The Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with 2005 global annual sales of US$39. ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... It has been proposed that Telerobotics be merged and redirected into this article. ... In biostatistics or psychological statistics, a research subject is any organism (animal or plant) that is observed for purposes of research. ... MyLifeBits is a Microsoft Research project to create a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bushs 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. ... Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 30, 1974) was an American engineer and science administrator, known for his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and idea of the memex—seen as a pioneering concept for the World Wide Web. ...

Bell is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, ACM, IEEE, and member of the National Academy of Engineering. His awards include: the IEEE Von Neumann Medal, Fellow of the Computer History Museum, honorary D. Eng. from WPI, the AEA Inventor Award, the IEEE Eminent Member's Award of Eta Kappa Nu, and The 1991 National Medal of Technology by President George Bush. For other Worcester Colleges, see Worcester College (disambiguation). ...

A cofounder of The Computer Museum, Boston, MA in 1979, and a founding board member of its successor, the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA in 1999. This page refers to the year 1979. ... The Computer History Museum in Mountain View. ... 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ...

Books

• (with Allen Newell) Computer Structures: Readings and Examples (1971)
• (with C. Mudge and J. McNamara) Computer Engineering (1978)
• (with Dan Siewiorek and Allen Newell) Computer Structures: Readings and Examples (1982)
• (with J. McNamara) High Tech Ventures: The Guide for Entrepreneurial Success (1991)

Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 - July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie-Mellon’s School of Computer Science. ... 1971 (MCMLXXI) was a common year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1971 calendar). ... 1978 (MCMLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1978 calendar). ... Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 - July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie-Mellon’s School of Computer Science. ... 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1991 (MCMXCI) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Quotes

From Computer World "VAX Man" interview, Oct. 1992.

• "Microsoft NT...is going to be very far-reaching. It's going to grab the rug out from under Unix."
• "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.' "

One of his classic sayings while working at DEC: Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...

• "The most reliable components are the ones you leave out."

Bell's Law of Computer Class Formation

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 (or 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 (60's), minicomputers (70's), networked workstations and personal computers (80's), browser-web-server structure (90's), web services (2000's), palm computing (1995), convergence of cell phones and computers (2003), and Wireless Sensor Networks aka motes (2004). Beginning in the 1990s, a single class of scalable computers called clusters built from a few to tens of thousands of commodity microcomputer-storage-networked bricks began to cover and replace mainframes, minis, and workstation. Bell predicts home and body area networks will form by 2010. Established market class computers aka platforms are introduced and continue to evolve at roughly a constant price (subject to learning curve cost reduction) with increasing functionality (or performance) based on Moores Law that gives more transistors per die, more bits per magnetic areal density, or functionality per system. ... 1972 (MCMLXXII) was a leap year starting on Saturday. ...

External links

• Gordon Bell homepage at Microsoft
• National Museum of American History interview by David K. Allison, Curator, 1995. [1]