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This is the 28th volume of Memorial Tributes compiled by the National Academy of Engineering as a personal remembrance of the lives and outstanding achievements of its members and international members. These volumes are intended to stand as an enduring record of the many contributions of engineers and engineering to the benefit of humankind. In most cases, the authors of the tributes are contemporaries or colleagues who had personal knowledge of the interests and the engineering accomplishments of the deceased. Through its members and international members, the Academy...
This is the 28th volume of Memorial Tributes compiled by the National Academy of Engineering as a personal remembrance of the lives and outstanding achievements of its members and international members. These volumes are intended to stand as an enduring record of the many contributions of engineers and engineering to the benefit of humankind. In most cases, the authors of the tributes are contemporaries or colleagues who had personal knowledge of the interests and the engineering accomplishments of the deceased. Through its members and international members, the Academy carries out the responsibilities for which it was established in 1964.
Under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering was formed as a parallel organization of outstanding engineers. Members are elected on the basis of significant contributions to engineering theory and practice and to the literature of engineering or on the basis of demonstrated unusual accomplishments in the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology. The National Academies share a responsibility to advise the federal government on matters of science and technology. The expertise and credibility that the National Academy of Engineering brings to that task stem directly from the abilities, interests, and achievements of our members and international members, our colleagues and friends, whose special gifts we remember in this book.
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BY DAVID N. CUTLER AND EDWARD D. LAZOWSKA
“Old computer pioneers never die, they just lose their physical bits.” – C. Gordon Bell, May 2024
CHESTER GORDON BELL, a technology visionary and a giant of the computer industry, died—with his wife, Sheridan, by his side—on May 17, 2024, in Coronado, California. He was 89.
Gordon was born Aug. 19, 1934, to Chester and Lola (née Gordon) Bell in Kirksville, Missouri, where, as a teenager, he repaired appliances and wired homes for Bell Electric, the family business. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from MIT, spent two years in Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship, and then returned to MIT, where he worked in the Speech Computation Laboratory.
In 1960, Gordon was recruited by Ken Olsen (NAE 1977) and Harlan Anderson to join Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), then a three-year-old company. As the computer architect who drove the minicomputer revolution, he pioneered interactive computing with the PDP series of powerful yet affordable workgroup computers.
After six years at DEC, Gordon took a leave of absence to teach computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. There, he articulated “Bell’s Law for the Birth and Death of Computer Classes,” arguing that technological advances cause the emergence of a new computer class approximately every decade — mainframes, minicomputers, personal computers, and beyond. With Allen Newell (NAE 1980), he co-authored Computer Structures: Readings and Examples (McGraw-Hill, 1971), which presented a systematized view of computer architectures.
Gordon returned to DEC in 1972 as vice president of research and development, where he led the creation of the VAX family of minicomputers. The VAX-11/780, launched in 1978 alongside the VAX/VMS operating system, became a dominant force in industry and academia, propelling DEC to the strong position of the world’s second-largest computer manufacturer. He also played an instrumental role in the Digital-Intel-Xerox partnership that established Ethernet as the standard for local area networking. Because of his pioneering role in these advances, Gordon became known not only as “the father of the minicomputer” but also, in many ways, as “the father of distributed computing.”
By the early 1980s, DEC’s growing bureaucracy frustrated Gordon. In 1982, he bluntly expressed his views in an internal memo to the company’s engineering leadership: “I believe 1/2 of these people could be let go from DEC today and our productivity would take a sharp rise . . . since we have the reputation for never firing anyone we can put them in a new group I propose we start called NOD (No Output Division) where they won’t take time from people who have real work to do.”
Leaving DEC for the final time in 1983, Gordon co-founded Encore Computer, which developed the Multimax, a shared memory multiprocessor that utilized bus snooping. He also co-founded Ardent Computer, which produced the Titan, a personal graphics supercomputer. In 1986, he became the first head of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, where he shaped NSF’s support for academic research in computer science and engineering. One of his major contributions was envisioning and scaling NSFNet, which bridged the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) of the 1970s to the global internet of today.
After his tenure at NSF, he remained active as an angel investor and consultant. In 1987, he established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize1 in high-performance computing, awarded annually for achievements in scalability and time-to-solution in science and engineering. He played a key role in the creation of Microsoft Research in 1991, working closely with Bill Gates (NAE 1996) and Nathan Myhrvold, and joined Microsoft in 1995, focusing on telepresence and life-logging. In 2015, he and Dave Cutler (NAE 1994), his DEC and Microsoft colleague, established the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing,2 awarded annually to up to four outstanding high school students in computer science. In 2023, he established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling,3 recognizing innovative parallel computing contributions toward addressing climate change.
Gordon was dedicated to preserving computer history as much as shaping it. In 1975, alongside Ken Olsen, Gordon and his then-wife Gwen, established the Computer Museum in DEC’s Maynard, Massachusetts, headquarters, which eventually evolved into the Computer History Museum (CHM)4 in Mountain View, California. A long-time trustee and generous supporter of CHM, Gordon helped build the world’s largest collection of computing artifacts. The museum’s mission reflects his lifelong commitment to the field: to educate and inspire, to preserve and promote an understanding of computing, and to serve as a global resource for research into computing history.
Gordon is survived by his wife, Sheridan Sinclaire-Bell, whom he married in 2009; his son, Brigham Bell, and Brigham’s wife, Pamela Bell; his daughter, Laura Bell, and her husband, Robert Schultz; his stepdaughter, Logan Forbes, and her husband, Stjepan Ilich; grandchildren Fiona Bell, Bridget Bell, Kolbe Schultz, and Stryker Schultz; his sister, Sharon Smith, and her husband, Gerald Smith; and his former wife, Gwendolyn Bell.
_________________________________ 1Association for Computing Machinery. ACM Gordon Bell Prize. Online at https://awards.acm.org/bell. 2Association for Computing Machinery. ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing. Online at https://awards.acm.org/cutler-bell. 3Association for Computing Machinery. ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling. Online at https://awards.acm.org/bell-climate. 4Computer History Museum. Online at https://computerhistory.org/.