Gordon Bell

Gordon Bell

C. Gordon Bell (born August 19, 1934 in Kirksville , Missouri ) is an American computer engineer and manager. He was with DEC in the 1960s , for whom he developed several PDP series computers and in the 1970s was in charge of VAX development.

Bell was early on in the family business for electrical installation and repair of electrical appliances. He studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a bachelor's degree in 1956 and a master's degree in 1957. He then taught computer science as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Australia before returning to MIT, where he was worked on speech coding programs in the Speech Computation Laboratory. In 1960 he moved to the newly founded computer company DEC. He developed the input / output system of the PDP-1 and was then one of the main architects, for example with the PDP 4 and 6. In 1966 he went to Carnegie Mellon University to teach computer science. In 1972 he returned to DEC as Vice President of Engineering and led VAX development (the main architect was his PhD student William D. Strecker ). In 1983 he left DEC after a heart attack.

He was then involved in founding his own computer companies (Encore Computer and Ardent Computer in 1986, which merged with Stellar in 1989 to form Stardent Computer) and was a consultant to various organizations and companies; Among other things, he founded the Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1986 . From 1991 he was a consultant at Microsoft and from 1995 a senior scientist at Microsoft Research .

In 1992 he received the first John von Neumann Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and in 1991 the National Medal of Technology . In 1987, on his initiative, the ACM and IEEE Gordon Bell Prize for parallel computer development was founded. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the IEEE and ACM, the National Academy of Sciences (2007), the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (2009) and the National Academy of Engineering (1977). In 2010 he received an honorary doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University and he is an honorary doctorate from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (1993). In 1975 he received the W. Wallace McDowell Award and in 2014 the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award .

With his wife, Gwen Bell, he co-founded the Boston Computer Museum in 1979 (which received many exhibits from DEC). It closed in 1999; some of the exhibits went to the Boston Museum of Science and some to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, founded in 1996 .

Fonts

• with Daniel Siewiorek , Allen Newell Computer Structures: Reading and Examples , McGraw Hill 1982 (first 1971)
• with J. Craig Mudge. John E. McNamara Computer Engineering: A DEC view of hardware system design , Digital Press, Bedford, Massachusetts 1978
• with John McNamara High Tech Ventures: The Guide for Entrepreneurial Success , Addison-Wesley 1991
• with Jim Gemmell Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution will change everything , New York, Dutton 2009 (foreword by Bill Gates), paperback edition uploaded as Your life: the digital way to better memory, health and productivity , 2010

Web links

• Site at Microsoft Research (English)