Chester Gordon Bell, a technological visionary whose computer designs for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) helped launch the minicomputer industry in the 1960s, died on Friday at his home in Coronado, California. He was 89 years old. The cause was pneumonia, his family said in a statement.
Chester Gordon Bell was born on August 19, 1934 in Kirksville, Missouri, to Chester Bell, an electrician who owned a home appliance store, and Lola (Gordon) Bell, who taught elementary school. By the age of 12, he was already a professional electrician — installing the first home dishwashers, repairing motors, and taking apart mechanical devices to rebuild them. Bell graduated from MIT in 1957 with a master’s degree in electrical engineering.
Gordon Bell was the chief architect in creating smaller, affordable interactive computers that could be networked. At a time when computer companies such as IBM were selling multi-million dollar mainframes, Digital Equipment Corporation aimed to introduce smaller, more powerful machines that could be purchased for a fraction of that cost. In 1960, Bell joined the company as an engineer. Here he was involved in the development of relevant architectures and subsystems.
The result of this work was the 12-bit PDP-8 computer, introduced in 1965 at a price of $18 thousand. This system was considered the first successful minicomputer on the market. More importantly, DEC minicomputers were sold to scientists, engineers, and other users who interacted directly with machines in an era when corporate computers were inaccessible to such users and were located in data centers.
Due to differences in views with DEC management, Gordon Bell took a 6-year sabbatical, during which he taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In 1972, he returned to the company as Vice President of Engineering.
It was then that he formulated the law of computer classes. He argues that approximately every decade, due to advances in semiconductors, storage, programming platforms, networking, and interface technologies, a new, cheaper class of computer emerges, leading to new uses and the creation of a new industry.
Upon his return to DEC, Gordon Bell led the development of the all-new VAX 780 computer architecture. The fast, powerful, and efficient minicomputer was a huge success, boosting sales that made DEC the world’s second largest computer manufacturer in the early 1980s.
Still, the atmosphere at DEC remained unfavorable for Bell. In March 1983, he suffered a serious heart attack and would have died if not for the efforts of Bob Paffer, the company’s vice president, who saved him with cardiopulmonary resuscitation. In the summer of 1983, Gordon Bell retired from the company.
Later, Bell founded Encore Computer and Ardent Computer. In 1986, he plunged into the world of public policy when he joined the National Science Foundation and led work on a supercomputer network that led to an early iteration of the Internet called the National Research and Education Network.
In 1987, Bell established an annual prize in his name to promote and develop leading technologies of high performance.
Subsequently, Chester Gordon Bell moved to California, where he became an angel investor in Silicon Valley, and in 1991 became an advisor to Microsoft, which was opening its first research laboratory in Redmond, Washington. In 1995, Mr. Bell joined Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Lab full-time. There, he worked on MyLifeBits, a database designed to collect all of his life’s information — articles, books, CDs, letters, emails, music, home movies, and videos — into a cloud-based digital database.