“I am very sad to report death May 17 at age 89 of Gordon Bell, famous computer pioneer, a founder of Computer Museum in Boston, and a force behind the @ComputerHistory her in Silicon Valley, and good friend since the 1980s.
He succumbed to aspiration pneumonia in Coronado, CA.
I'm told there will be a "Celebration of Life" service in August in Silicon Valley.
(Another fallen giant, we attended a similar service in April for another, Nobelist Arno Penzias.)”
We lost Cray* to an untimely automobile accident. It'd be possible to have many fewer of those in the future, but that policy seems to be a much harder sell than I'd think it would be.
* when the Mac team bragged they'd used a Cray to design their latest version (heat flow simulation IIRC), Cray humblebragged back that he'd used a Mac to design his latest version.
Gordon was the first investor in my first startup, the first guy that believed in us.
Even though I only met him later in his life he was still sharp as a tack, never lost the mind of the engineer. Sometimes it's best not to meet your heroes but Gordon lived up to the hype and then some.
Super gentle, generous with his time, the consummate gentleman.
One of my fondest memories from my startup years was enjoying dinner with Gordon and his wife in Sydney, she made the most amazing cookies. To this day I don't think I have had a better cookie haha.
Visited the computer history museum with him once for a bit of a VIP tour I guess. So many stories about PDPs and all the friends he made along the way.
Thanks for all the stories and memories old man, you have earned your rest.
His lifelogging was a project called MyLifeBits. He wore a camera that took a picture every 20 seconds. Even called the book about his work Total Recall (and MSFT's new product that does something similar on the desktop is called Recall). Someone who worked with him at MSR wrote about it:
The book is wonderful, as biz-tech-optimist quick reads go, and some of its ideas have stuck with me over a decade after reading it. I'm almost entirely off MSFT products now but i was heartened to see the Recall announcement the other day. Bell was a rare visionary. RIP
Just thought how nice it is to read so many warm and heartfelt memories in all those obituaries. Wonder if it’ll be the same for current tech leaders/ maybe something for them to consider…
There will be some, either due to their current contributions or decisions they make later in life. It is just hard to see that in the present since news tends to (and has always tended to) focus upon controversy.
My father worked with him at CMU and the story he always told (while possibly apocryphal) was that the reason that the ASCII bell character sequence was CRTL-G was because of Gordon.
it seems somewhat unlikely. let's follow the trail
the existence of bell characters, of course, predates gordon bell's existence itself (they're in the ita2 baudot-murray code from 01932, two years before his birth) so what we're discussing is specifically the assignment of the ascii bell character to the control character corresponding to bell's middle initial
it was already ^g in 01963 according to tom jennings's excellent history https://web.archive.org/web/20100414012008/http://wps.com/pr...https://landley.net/history/mirror/ascii.html#ASCII-1963 and at that point bell had just started working at dec three years before. however, he was working on serial communications at dec, and had just been doing research at mit, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if he, or friends of his from mit or dec, were to sit on the ansi (then asa) committee
mackenzie's 'coded character sets' from 01980 has a chapter 13 about ascii https://textfiles.meulie.net/bitsaved/Books/Mackenzie_CodedC... but unfortunately it doesn't go into any detail on the composition of the asa committee. note that mackenzie was the ibm thug who invented ebcdic and spent the 60s and 70s trying to kill ascii, so he devotes most of the book to glorifying that catastrophic error; the book is from 01980, the year before ibm shipped its first ascii-supporting equipment, the ibm pc. it's reasonable to see jennings's account as a violent reaction against mackenzie's book, writing the malignant influence of the punched-card codes out of history entirely, though, as we'll see, the original draft of ascii was designed by a punched-card man
bell's oral history interviews https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270203... don't mention ascii or asa or ansi, so he probably wasn't on the committee, but if it was a connivance by a friend of his, it would be easy to imagine him deliberately not mentioning it
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/363831.363839 is an early (01965) publication of what eventually became ascii-1967, but it doesn't list the subcommittee members; the subcommittee seems to have been x3.2 at that point, though the 01963 document was called x3.4-1963
http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/06/1963.idg/ says the original proposal was submitted to ansi (though other sources say ansi didn't exist yet) by bob bemer of ibm in 01961. i thought it would be interesting to see if it already had ^g for bel, because bemer would be unlikely to know bell at that point
in 02002 bemer wrote a 52-page history of ascii himself called 'a story of ascii' https://archive.org/details/ascii-bemer which includes a survey of coded character sets from 01960, including the character set used on the 'lincolnwriter' at mit, where bell had been working, and the pdp-1 for which bell designed the uart, as well as another 40 or so. so it wasn't like there was no contac...
I like that your deep dive into whether this story might be true is the polar opposite of the "too good to check" impulse in journalism & social media, which instead tries to squeeze some attention & entertainment out of a pleasing story before doing any checks that might ruin the illusion.
The grandparent thought this was implausible, researched it as an outsider (with a slight bias towards thinking the claim is false, which is not a problem per se) and still didn't find any refutation. While I applaud the impetus behind the research, I'm more inclined to believe the apocryphal story after reading the attempt to refute it; not every piece of gossip will be supported by a written statement.
while, rationally speaking, a diligent search for evidence regarding a story that comes up finding no evidence for it, and weak evidence against it, ought to make us less inclined to believe the story, people don't always work that way. this is a well-documented cognitive error, commonly called the 'backfire effect', though it doesn't always manifest
i wasn't attempting to refute the story. i was attempting to find out the truth, and i find your summary of that search as 'attempting to refute the apocryphal story' somewhat offensive
my summary of what i found is that the assignment of ^g to the bell control code happened before gordon bell was well-known, on a continent where he did not live, in the deliberations of a standards body he had no involvement with, revising a proposal from a company that competed with his company, before the construction of any software or hardware that used key-chords such as control+g to produce control codes
under these circumstances it is not impossible that one of bell's colleagues from dec made the proposal, or at least was motivated to advocate it by knowing him¹, but given that i couldn't turn up any involvement of dec or mit people in the standards process at all, much less in the delegation the usa sent to europe for the meeting where the change was made, it seems pretty unlikely
______
¹ and predicting the invention of the control key, and that the proposal to start the alphabet at codepoint 64 instead of 65 would fail; but both of these seem to have been fairly predictable
> Gordon Bell (after lunch, it's wonderful having God and Marshall McHulan
here to correct one's self) emailed:
> I did build/invent the first UART in '61, made the Ethernet deal with Intel
and Xerox to have LANs, and DECnet was the first commercial
implementation or ARPAnet, so I have had a long term interest in communcations.
> Every notice that the bell rings when you push ctrl g on the old
teletypes?
> Also, built first commercial timesharing system.
I remember watching a Channel 9 video about a decade or so ago where they visited Bell and co at the MSR office in San Francisco. That's where Gordon wanted to be and so Microsoft opened an office for him. In the video he was wearing a video camera around his neck and speaking a bit about the MyLifeBits project, IIRC. Now that I'm middle-aged and my relationship to technology has been changing, I'm struck by the passion, curiosity, and engagement he continued to exhibit. Remarkable lifelong attitude.
> CHM is saddened to share the news that Museum cofounder and Fellow Gordon Bell passed away on May 17, 2024. Bell was a prominent American electrical engineer and computer scientist who made a tremendous impact on the world of computing—from handheld devices to supercomputers. Bell is in the pantheon of brilliant computer designers that includes Seymour Cray and Gene Amdahl.
> Beyond his groundbreaking engineering contributions, Bell has been a major force in preserving and presenting the history of computing to millions of visitors and explaining its impact on the world around us. With his then-wife, Gwen, and DEC cofounder Ken Olsen, he started The Computer Museum in Boston, which later became the Computer History Museum. Bell was a generous longtime donor and active member of the Board of Trustees. He will be missed by all.
It was unfortunate (at least for East Coasters) that the Computer Museum moved to the West Coast in 1999 -- I used to enjoy visiting it in Boston in the 1980s and 1990s. But I suppose with the decline of DEC and the rise of Microsoft and Apple in the 1980s that the center of the computer industry moved West too.
I work at CHM, and we had a staff lunch today coincidentally. I raised a (non-alcoholic) toast in tribute to Gordon Bell with colleagues as we dined at my lunch table. Grateful for his legacy!
My wife jokes that we’ve never made it to the end of that museum, because the museum has always closed before we get to the end, and we’ve been at least a dozen times. I had no idea he cofounded it, among his other accomplishments.
I used Computer Structures:Readings and Examples in an architecture class, and High Tech Ventures in an entrepreneurial class at Stanford.
I feel that Digital Equipment Corp entered a death spiral when he left.
As a volunteer, I was fortunate that I was able to work with him on some projects at the Computer History Museum. I wish that I had taped him discussing many of the artifacts in the exhibit, especially machines he worked on.
I created some training notebooks for CHM docents using chapters from Computer Structures, and the 1982 revised version.
> MyLifeBits is a life-logging experiment begun in 2001. It is a Microsoft Research project inspired by Vannevar Bush's hypothetical Memex computer system. The project includes full-text search, text and audio annotations, and hyperlinks. The "experimental subject" of the project is computer scientist Gordon Bell, and the project will try to collect a lifetime of storage on and about Bell.. For this, Bell has digitized all documents he has read or produced, CDs, emails, and so on. He continues to do so, gathering web pages browsed, phone and instant messaging conversations and the like more or less automatically. The book Total Recall describes the vision and implications for a personal, lifetime e-memory for recall, work, health, education, and immortality. In 2010, Total Recall was published in paperback. As of 2016, Bell was no longer using the wearable camera associated with the project. He described the rise of the smartphone as largely fulfilling Bush's vision of the Memex.
I went to Mountain View/SV/California for the first time maybe 5 years ago and the CHM was so much cooler than I expected. It made me incredibly envious to have grown up on the east coast in the 90s where none of my friends had a computer until the early-mid 2000s instead of CA. Everyone I knew online was from California for a LONG time. I feel like I missed out on so much cool stuff because I learned most things out of Barnes and Noble books that I couldn't afford instead of being enmeshed in the culture.
Gordon was one of the founders of Encore Computer and my first encounter was in Mass at the point Hydra, Resolution, Foundation and the other component company acquisitions were melding together. I remember being gob smacked by Gordon having a little Vax as his PC and only later came the "well of course he does" realization. He was keen for us to get on to Arpanet and that happened before the end of 1984.
The same day he dies, Microsoft announces version control in Windows Explorer, which he originally bought to the file system in VMS. I know he worked on NT, I wonder why they didn’t introduce version control before now.
I was just recently on a youtube trip listening to all his talks and interviews. Also read some stuff, But I need to get the 'Computer Engineering' book. And I love history, and he did so much both as a participant, analyst and historian. Defiantly want to learn even more.
74 comments
[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadhttps://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/112477330642538953
It’s short enough that I’ll quote it here.
“I am very sad to report death May 17 at age 89 of Gordon Bell, famous computer pioneer, a founder of Computer Museum in Boston, and a force behind the @ComputerHistory her in Silicon Valley, and good friend since the 1980s. He succumbed to aspiration pneumonia in Coronado, CA. I'm told there will be a "Celebration of Life" service in August in Silicon Valley. (Another fallen giant, we attended a similar service in April for another, Nobelist Arno Penzias.)”
HN should post the black bar.
"When I lead tours of Computer History Museum, I usually say there were 3 giants in the early decades of computer architecture:
Gene Amdhal - mainframes
Gordon Bell - minicomputers
Seymour Cray - supercomputers
and I was lucky to know the first two well, never met Cray."
https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/112477430691339073
We lost Cray* to an untimely automobile accident. It'd be possible to have many fewer of those in the future, but that policy seems to be a much harder sell than I'd think it would be.
* when the Mac team bragged they'd used a Cray to design their latest version (heat flow simulation IIRC), Cray humblebragged back that he'd used a Mac to design his latest version.
Even though I only met him later in his life he was still sharp as a tack, never lost the mind of the engineer. Sometimes it's best not to meet your heroes but Gordon lived up to the hype and then some.
Super gentle, generous with his time, the consummate gentleman.
One of my fondest memories from my startup years was enjoying dinner with Gordon and his wife in Sydney, she made the most amazing cookies. To this day I don't think I have had a better cookie haha.
Visited the computer history museum with him once for a bit of a VIP tour I guess. So many stories about PDPs and all the friends he made along the way.
Thanks for all the stories and memories old man, you have earned your rest.
RIP.
Gordon Bell practiced "lifelogging", so maybe!
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gordon-bell-standing-shoulder...
This is quite a read: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
ASCII was developed in 1963 by a guy from IBM while Bell was at DEC. However since Bell has worked in the PDP's UART, it's possible...
the existence of bell characters, of course, predates gordon bell's existence itself (they're in the ita2 baudot-murray code from 01932, two years before his birth) so what we're discussing is specifically the assignment of the ascii bell character to the control character corresponding to bell's middle initial
it was already ^g in 01963 according to tom jennings's excellent history https://web.archive.org/web/20100414012008/http://wps.com/pr... https://landley.net/history/mirror/ascii.html#ASCII-1963 and at that point bell had just started working at dec three years before. however, he was working on serial communications at dec, and had just been doing research at mit, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if he, or friends of his from mit or dec, were to sit on the ansi (then asa) committee
mackenzie's 'coded character sets' from 01980 has a chapter 13 about ascii https://textfiles.meulie.net/bitsaved/Books/Mackenzie_CodedC... but unfortunately it doesn't go into any detail on the composition of the asa committee. note that mackenzie was the ibm thug who invented ebcdic and spent the 60s and 70s trying to kill ascii, so he devotes most of the book to glorifying that catastrophic error; the book is from 01980, the year before ibm shipped its first ascii-supporting equipment, the ibm pc. it's reasonable to see jennings's account as a violent reaction against mackenzie's book, writing the malignant influence of the punched-card codes out of history entirely, though, as we'll see, the original draft of ascii was designed by a punched-card man
bell's oral history interviews https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270203... don't mention ascii or asa or ansi, so he probably wasn't on the committee, but if it was a connivance by a friend of his, it would be easy to imagine him deliberately not mentioning it
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/363831.363839 is an early (01965) publication of what eventually became ascii-1967, but it doesn't list the subcommittee members; the subcommittee seems to have been x3.2 at that point, though the 01963 document was called x3.4-1963
http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/06/1963.idg/ says the original proposal was submitted to ansi (though other sources say ansi didn't exist yet) by bob bemer of ibm in 01961. i thought it would be interesting to see if it already had ^g for bel, because bemer would be unlikely to know bell at that point
in 02002 bemer wrote a 52-page history of ascii himself called 'a story of ascii' https://archive.org/details/ascii-bemer which includes a survey of coded character sets from 01960, including the character set used on the 'lincolnwriter' at mit, where bell had been working, and the pdp-1 for which bell designed the uart, as well as another 40 or so. so it wasn't like there was no contac...
i wasn't attempting to refute the story. i was attempting to find out the truth, and i find your summary of that search as 'attempting to refute the apocryphal story' somewhat offensive
my summary of what i found is that the assignment of ^g to the bell control code happened before gordon bell was well-known, on a continent where he did not live, in the deliberations of a standards body he had no involvement with, revising a proposal from a company that competed with his company, before the construction of any software or hardware that used key-chords such as control+g to produce control codes
under these circumstances it is not impossible that one of bell's colleagues from dec made the proposal, or at least was motivated to advocate it by knowing him¹, but given that i couldn't turn up any involvement of dec or mit people in the standards process at all, much less in the delegation the usa sent to europe for the meeting where the change was made, it seems pretty unlikely
______
¹ and predicting the invention of the control key, and that the proposal to start the alphabet at codepoint 64 instead of 65 would fail; but both of these seem to have been fairly predictable
> Gordon Bell (after lunch, it's wonderful having God and Marshall McHulan here to correct one's self) emailed:
> I did build/invent the first UART in '61, made the Ethernet deal with Intel and Xerox to have LANs, and DECnet was the first commercial implementation or ARPAnet, so I have had a long term interest in communcations.
> Every notice that the bell rings when you push ctrl g on the old teletypes?
> Also, built first commercial timesharing system.
via Gordon Bell – The No Output Division (1982) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38490320 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)
> REMEMBERING CHM COFOUNDER GORDON BELL
> CHM is saddened to share the news that Museum cofounder and Fellow Gordon Bell passed away on May 17, 2024. Bell was a prominent American electrical engineer and computer scientist who made a tremendous impact on the world of computing—from handheld devices to supercomputers. Bell is in the pantheon of brilliant computer designers that includes Seymour Cray and Gene Amdahl.
> Beyond his groundbreaking engineering contributions, Bell has been a major force in preserving and presenting the history of computing to millions of visitors and explaining its impact on the world around us. With his then-wife, Gwen, and DEC cofounder Ken Olsen, he started The Computer Museum in Boston, which later became the Computer History Museum. Bell was a generous longtime donor and active member of the Board of Trustees. He will be missed by all.
Here he is speaking at a CHM event last year on Ethernet's 50th: https://youtu.be/T9On2L0-ObU?t=2267
Out of a Closet: The Early Years of Years of The Computer [X] Museums https://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=147...
And here's a website he created to capture the history of the original Computer Museum(s) at DEC and then Boston:
https://tcm.computerhistory.org
In Memoriam: Gordon Bell (1934–2024)
https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-gordon-bell-193...
I used Computer Structures:Readings and Examples in an architecture class, and High Tech Ventures in an entrepreneurial class at Stanford.
I feel that Digital Equipment Corp entered a death spiral when he left.
As a volunteer, I was fortunate that I was able to work with him on some projects at the Computer History Museum. I wish that I had taped him discussing many of the artifacts in the exhibit, especially machines he worked on.
I created some training notebooks for CHM docents using chapters from Computer Structures, and the 1982 revised version.
> MyLifeBits is a life-logging experiment begun in 2001. It is a Microsoft Research project inspired by Vannevar Bush's hypothetical Memex computer system. The project includes full-text search, text and audio annotations, and hyperlinks. The "experimental subject" of the project is computer scientist Gordon Bell, and the project will try to collect a lifetime of storage on and about Bell.. For this, Bell has digitized all documents he has read or produced, CDs, emails, and so on. He continues to do so, gathering web pages browsed, phone and instant messaging conversations and the like more or less automatically. The book Total Recall describes the vision and implications for a personal, lifetime e-memory for recall, work, health, education, and immortality. In 2010, Total Recall was published in paperback. As of 2016, Bell was no longer using the wearable camera associated with the project. He described the rise of the smartphone as largely fulfilling Bush's vision of the Memex.
"Total Recall" (2009) by Gordon Bell, https://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Memory-Revolution-Everyt...
Rest in peace
I hope we are going to conquer these "simple" causes in the next couple of years.
Condolences to all who knew him.