C. Gordon Bell, an engineer who helped usher in the era of modern computing by moving technology beyond the massive mainframes of the past and toward the desktops and laptops of the present, an innovation that made him known as the father of the minicomputer, died May 17 at his home in Coronado, Calif. He was 89.
The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Sheridan Sinclaire-Bell.
A techie before the word existed, Mr. Bell spent more than half a century on the vanguard of computer science. He began his career in 1960, shortly after his graduation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when he joined the fledgling Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) outside Boston in Maynard, Mass.
At the time, the most sophisticated computers were mainframes, machines so large that they filled entire rooms and came with price tags running into the millions of dollars. Mr. Bell envisioned a new type of computer, one built on a smaller scale to make the power of computing more affordable and more accessible. It would become known as the minicomputer.
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Mr. Bell designed a family of computers known as VAX — short for Virtual Address eXtension — which debuted in 1977 and became available in increasingly compact size. VAX emerged as “the de facto standard computing system for industry, the sciences, engineering, and research,” according to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., which Mr. Bell helped found.
VAX also helped make DEC, for a period, the second-largest computer maker in the world, eclipsed only by IBM. Regarded as one of the most influential computer engineers of his time, Mr. Bell rose to the rank of vice president for research and development.
He took a long view of technology, postulating a rule called Bell’s law to explain the evolution of computers from one generation to the next. The minicomputer, for its part, served as a technological steppingstone to modern-day personal computers, a class of machine once called microcomputers.
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“Gordon Bell is one of the few people who not only witnessed, but in fact drove, the transition of computers from room-filling behemoths to portable computers — personal computers we have on our desk and computers we have in our pockets with the iPhone,” Dag Spicer, a senior curator at the Computer History Museum, said in an interview.
Mr. Bell spent most of his career in the private sector, co-founding and advising start-ups in addition to his work at DEC, and later joined Microsoft’s research labs. He took a hiatus from the business world in 1986 to join the National Science Foundation, where he became the founding chief of its computer science directorate.
In 1991, Mr. Bell received a National Medal of Technology and Innovation. He was honored for both his work at DEC and at the NSF, where he “led the initiative to link the world’s supercomputers on a high-speed network — the Internet — transforming the way researchers collaborate and share data,” according to a citation accompanying the award.
Chester Gordon Bell was born in Kirksville, Mo., on Aug. 19, 1934. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father ran a shop that sold and fixed appliances.
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In second grade, Mr. Bell was found to have a heart murmur and spent months in bed, passing part of the time tinkering with electrical circuitry. Later, apprenticed to his father, he acquired the skills of a journeyman electrician by the time he entered his teens.
Mr. Bell was accepted into a dual program at MIT, receiving a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, both in electrical engineering and awarded in 1957.
He received a Fulbright fellowship to study in Australia at the University of New South Wales. There, he met his first wife, Gwen Druyor. He proposed via an English Electric DEUCE computer as he sat at one terminal and she sat at another.
They returned to the United States, where Mr. Bell joined DEC. He took a sabbatical from the company during the late 1960s and early 1970s to teach computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
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With Druyor and DEC co-founder Kenneth Olsen, Mr. Bell created the institution that is today the Computer History Museum. (It was originally located in Massachusetts.)
Mr. Bell’s first marriage ended in divorce. He and Sinclaire-Bell were married in 2009. He had no other marriages, “except to his computer, to be honest with you,” she joked; he called the device “my Puter.”
Besides Puter, survivors include Sinclaire-Bell, of Coronado and San Francisco; two children from his first marriage, Brigham Bell of Louisville, Colo., and Laura Bell of Hillsborough, N.J.; a stepdaughter, Logan Forbes of Mountain View; a sister; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Bell’s interests and endeavors evolved with technology. Among his later projects, undertaken when he was at Microsoft, was one he called MyLifeBits — an effort, essentially, to digitize his entire life.
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The database included photographs, home videos, his favorite music, all his publications, correspondence including his emails since 1972 and drawings from his grandchildren, as well as recordings of phone calls and photos taken from a camera that he wore around his neck, including in his sleep.
He saw the project as a means of achieving digital immortality, which he believed everyone deserved, his wife said. His digital life consumes 10 gigabytes — a fraction of the space available on an average modern-day personal computer.
