At age 76, Gordon Bell is planning for the future. He’s interested in cloud computing and, as someone who sat on the National Science Foundation (NSF) committee that proposed the Internet, he’s now looking toward universal fiber service and “what that implies.” It’s not surprising that Bell is still looking ahead. After all, it’s something he’s done just about all of his life.
As one of the first employees of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), as a government policy advisor, as an entrepreneur, and as the founder of Microsoft Research, Bell has been a computer industry pioneer longer than just about anyone else. Along the way, he has left a trail of achievements in areas ranging from minicomputers to the Internet.
The Early Years
The man who has been described as the “Frank Lloyd Wright of Computers” was born in the sleepy farming community of Kirksville, Mo., on August 19, 1934. But Bell wasn’t interested in growing crops or milking cows. “I grew up as an electrician,” Bell says. His father, Chester, owned an appliance store, Bell Electric.
An early exposure to gadgets, instruction manuals, and electrical trade publications helped set the young Bell on a path that would lead him to a career in electrical engineering and computers. “I wanted to be an engineer probably before I even knew what an engineer was,” Bell says.
In 1952, Bell applied to and was accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), becoming the first person from Kirksville to attend the school. Bell thrived at MIT, both academically and socially. Perhaps most importantly, he grew to know Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, two men who would eventually decide to start their own computer company and set Bell on his historic career path.
After receiving BS and MS electrical engineering degrees from MIT, Bell decided in 1957 that he didn’t want to immediately seek a PhD. Instead, he followed the advice of his department head, who knew a founder of the University of New South Wales in Australia, and headed Down Under to teach on a Fulbright scholarship. At the university, Bell met another Fulbright scholar, Gwen Druyor, whom he married when they both returned to the U.S.
Back in America, Bell returned to MIT to pursue his doctorate. But he never got it. Instead, in 1960, he accepted an offer from DEC, the company founded by Olsen and Anderson, to become one of the company’s first employees. Visiting DEC to buy logic projects for a project he was working on, Bell found himself recruited for a job.
“They said, ‘Gee, why don’t you come to work here?” Bell recalls. “I became the company’s second engineer.”
Bell saw great potential in DEC, as well as an environment in which he could thrive. “I just liked the size of DEC,” he says. “The fact that here there’s only 80 people and they’re going to build a computer.”
The DEC Years
As DEC’s vice president of research and development from 1960 to 1983, Bell spearheaded the company’s mission of bringing computer systems to small and mid-sized businesses. He designed the I/O subsystem of the PDP-1—the first computer to host a game and play music.
Bell’s signal contribution to the PDP-1 was the first universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART), providing the first computer interface to connected serial devices. “I fell in love with communication at that time, because it was a sort of really quite clean way to design stuff,” he says.
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