Chester Gordon Bell (born August 19, 1934) is an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of Engineering 1972–1983, overseeing the development of the VAX. Bell's later career includes entrepreneur, investor, founding Assistant Director of NSF's Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate 1986–1987, and researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research, 1995–2015.
Bell received a B.S. (1956), and M.S. (1957) in electrical engineering from MIT. He then went to the New South Wales University of Technology (now UNSW) in Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship, where he taught classes on computer design, programmed one of the first computers to arrive in Australia (called UTECOM, an English Electric DEUCE) and published his first academic paper. Returning to the U.S., he worked in the MIT Speech Computation Laboratory under Professor Ken Stevens, where he wrote the first Analysis by Synthesis program.
The DEC founders Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson recruited him for their new company in 1960, where he designed the I/O subsystem of the PDP-1, including the first UART. Bell was the architect of the PDP-4Bell received a B.S. (1956), and M.S. (1957) in electrical engineering from MIT. He then went to the New South Wales University of Technology (now UNSW) in Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship, where he taught classes on computer design, programmed one of the first computers to arrive in Australia (called UTECOM, an English Electric DEUCE) and published his first academic paper. Returning to the U.S., he worked in the MIT Speech Computation Laboratory under Professor Ken Stevens, where he wrote the first Analysis by Synthesis program.
The DEC founders Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson recruited him for their new company in 1960, where he designed the I/O subsystem of the PDP-1, including the first UART. Bell was the architect of the PDP-4, and PDP-6. Other architectural contributions were to the PDP-5 and PDP-11 Unibus and General Registers architecture.[2]
After DEC, Bell went to Carnegie Mellon University in 1966 to teach computer science, but returned to DEC in 1972 as vice-president of engineering, where he was in charge of the VAX, DEC's most successful computer.
Bell is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994),[3] American Association for the Advancement of Science (1983), Association for Computing Machinery (1994), IEEE (1974), and member of the National Academy of Engineering (1977), National Academy of Science (2007), and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (2009).
He is also a member of the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard and a former member of the Sector Advisory Committee of Australia's Information and Communication Technology Division of the TTI/Vanguard and a former member of the Sector Advisory Committee of Australia's Information and Communication Technology Division of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
Bell was the first recipient of the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, in 1992.[4] His other awards include Fellow of the Computer History Museum, honorary D. Eng. from WPI, the AeA Inventor Award, the Vladimir Karapetoff Outstanding Technical Achievement Award of Eta Kappa Nu, and the 1991 National Medal of Technology by President George H.W. Bush.[5] He was also named an Eta Kappa Nu Eminent Member in 2007.
In 1993, Worcester Polytechnic Institute awarded Bell an Honorary Doctor of Engineering, and in 2010, Bell received an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree from Carnegie Mellon University. The university referred to him as "the father of the minicomputer".
Bell co-founded The Computer Museum, Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife Gwen Bell in 1979. He was a founding board member of its successor, the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. In 2003, he was made a Fellow of the Museum "for his key role in the minicomputer revolution, and for contributions as a computer architect and entrepreneur."[6] The story of the museum's evolution beginning in the early 1970s with Ken Olsen at Digital Equipment Corporation is described in the Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR-2011-44, "Out of a Closet: The Early Years of The Computer [x]* Museum".[7] A timeline of computing historical machines, events, and people is given on his website.[8] It covers from B.C. to the present.
Bell's law of computer classes[9] was first described in 1972 with the emergence of a new, lower priced microcomputer class based on the microprocessor. Established market class computers are introduced at a constant price with increasing functionality and performance. Technology advances in semiconductors, storage, interfaces and networks enable a new computer class (platform) to form about every decade to serve a new need. Each new usually lower priced class is maintained as a quasi independent industry (market). Classes include: mainframes (1960s), minicomputers (1970s), networked workstations and personal computers (1980s), browser-web-server structure (1990s), palm computing (1995), web services (2000s), convergence of cell phones and computers (2003), and Wireless Sensor Networks aka motes[clarification needed] (2004). Bell predicted that home and body area networks would form by 2010.