Gordon Bell dies at 89

Over 40 years after his March 1983 heart attack, computer scientist Gordon Bell died last Friday at his home in Coronado, California. The cause of death was aspiration pneumonia. He was 89 years old. Starting in the early 1960s, he was involved in multiple computing projects. 

Born in August 1934, Gordon Bell was recruited by Digital Equipment Corporation's founders Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1960. Until 1966, when he went to teach computer science at Carnegie Mellon, he worked on the I/O subsystem of the PDP-1 and was the architect of the PDP-4 and PDP-6. He was also part of the teams behind the PDP-5 and PDP-11 Unibus. Another key contribution to computing that carries his signature was the General Registers architecture. In 1972, Bell returned to DEC as the company's vice president of engineering. Here, he was in charge of the VAX computer lineup. Sadly, he resigned after the aforementioned heart attack.

After withdrawing from DEC, he founded Encore Computer, became involved with public policy, and established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize to encourage parallel processing research and development. During the 1980s, he also set the foundation of Ardent Computer. Bell moved on as an advisor with Microsoft in the first half of the 1990s. He joined the tech giant as a full-time employee in the summer of 1995 and became the subject of the MyLifeBits project. This project aimed to turn Vannevar Bush's vision into reality, a vision that is now a part of most people's daily lives thanks to smartphones and social media.

Last but not the least, it should also be mentioned that Gordon Bell also co-founded the Boston Computer Museum in 1979. Later, this early initiative became the center of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. 

Those who want to know more about the MyLifeBits project should read Gordon Bell's Your Life, Uploaded: The Digital Way to Better Memory, Health, and Productivity, a book that is now 33% off on Amazon ($16 instead of $24) and is just one of his many published works.