Gordon Bell, an architect of our digital age, dies at age 89$1:
Born in 1934 in Kirksville, Missouri, Gordon Bell earned degrees in electrical engineering from MIT before being recruited in 1960 by DEC founders Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson. As the second computer engineer hired at DEC, Bell worked on various components for the PDP-1 system, including floating-point subroutines, tape controllers, and a drum controller.
Bell also invented the first UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter) for serial communication during his time at DEC. He went on to architect several influential DEC systems, including the PDP-4 and PDP-6. In the 1970s, he played a key role in overseeing the aforementioned VAX minicomputer line as the engineering manager, with Bill Strecker serving as the primary architect for the VAX architecture.
After retiring from DEC in 1983, Bell remained active as an entrepreneur, policy adviser, and researcher. He co-founded Encore Computer and helped establish the NSF's Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate.
In 1995, Bell joined Microsoft Research where he studied telepresence technologies and served as the subject of the MyLifeBits life-logging project. The initiative aimed to realize Vannevar Bush's vision of a system that could store all the documents, photos, and audio a person experienced in their lifetime.
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