Gordon Bell has died
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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...
Definitely one of my heroes.
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 contact. as it happens, neither of those two character sets includes a bell character
the bell character appears in the first version of the ascii proposal in the leftmost column of table 3 on page 17 — but at position 10, from which it was moved to its current position of 7 (^g) after four revisions (iso/tc97 wg b, 01962 may 4, following x3.2/1, which was 01961 september 18). his only comment on why they moved all the control characters around was, 'the controls were regularized and grouped to 7 transmission controls, 6 format effectors, and 5 device controls; the improvement from the haphazardness of the previous proposals is quite apparent.' this was shortly before ibm sent him to the penalty box for promoting ascii, leading to him quitting to go to univac
at that point there was still disagreement about whether to start the alphabet at the beginning of a 16-codepoint 'column' or, as is done today, one character later, so that a corresponds to 1, b corresponds to 2, etc. so assigning bel to 7 could have ended up with it being ^h. (i'm not clear on whether the ctrl key existed yet, but i'm pretty sure bit-paired keyboards did, on the teletype.)
unfortunately bemer is also largely silent on the membership of the committee, though he does mention particular members from time to time. unless i've overlooked it, he doesn't mention anyone from mit or dec. the iso meeting was an international thing, with delegations from the us and various european countries, and thus seems particularly unlikely to have redesigned the character set to honor a dec engineer, who the committee members would think of as an american engineer
so it's probably just a coincidence, but the evidence i've been able to turn up is not very conclusive
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.
> 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:
In Memoriam: Gordon Bell (1934–2024)
https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-gordon-bell-193...
- Gordon Bell
Rest in Peace Legend.
I'm sure I join the entire community in wishing the best to his loved ones. He will be missed by all of us.
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...
via Gordon Bell – The No Output Division (1982) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38490320 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)
Rest in peace
Condolences to all who knew him.
https://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."
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.
I hope we are going to conquer these "simple" causes in the next couple of years.