7 ms·

Gordon Bell has died

1257 points by dcminter 2y ago

redbell 2y ago
As a side note, his personal page at https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/ https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/ doesn't seem to have been updated in more than ten years now. I believe it would make more sense to read "Gordon Bell (1934-2024)" instead of just "Gordon Bell".
pjmorris 2y ago
I've always loved 'The cheapest, fastest and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there.' -- Gordon Bell, as quoted in Jon Bentley's 'Programming Pearls.'
hnthrowaway0328 2y ago
I knew him through reading "Showstopper". What a loss!
smarks 2y ago
Here’s a link to Mashey’s post on mstdn: https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/112477330642538953 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.
- smarks 2y ago
  In the thread below his preview post, Mashey added the following (edited for typos): "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 https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/112477430691339073
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    > 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Bell
amirhirsch 2y ago
RIP. I had the pleasure of messaging with him while developing a PDP-11/70 hardware replacement 17 years ago.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  Just curious, did you write that up anywhere? Sounds potentially interesting to this audience.
  - amirhirsch 2y ago
    https://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2009/02/emulation-is-sincerest-form-of-flattery.html https://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2009/02/emulation-is-sinc...
jpgvm 2y ago
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. RIP.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  I wonder if that cookie recipe is written down somewhere. Gordon Bell practiced "lifelogging", so maybe!
  - avagate 2y ago
    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: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gordon-bell-standing-shoulders-giants-vik-singh-ydlec/?trackingId=dIjTwgBaQ3OkSxCyS4e8eQ%3D%3D https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gordon-bell-standing-shoulder...
    - skottenborg 2y ago
      Interesting. Stephen Wolfram also wears a camera that snaps pictures every 20 seconds for special events. This is quite a read: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
      - Roritharr 2y ago
brian_herman 2y ago
Black bar for Bell please?
- brian_herman 2y ago
  Thanks Dang!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
dumpHero2 2y ago
Top obituary posts on hn: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=has%20died&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- f_allwein 2y ago
  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…
  - II2II 2y ago
    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.
workergnome 2y ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  I have no data, but I wish that to be true. What an amazing tribute.
- inopinatus 2y ago
  code 007, it's a secret
  - kevindamm 2y ago
    Ah, hidden in plain sight, the seventh letter of the alphabet being G.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/page5.JPG https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-... 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...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kragen 2y ago
  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/projects/codes/index.html#ASCII-1963 https://web.archive.org/web/20100414012008/http://wps.com/pr... https://landley.net/history/mirror/ascii.html#ASCII-1963 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_CodedCharSets.pdf#page=233 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/102702036 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 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/ 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 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
aap_ 2y ago
One of the most influential people in computer history. I'm glad I got to exchange a few mails with him a few years ago. RIP, GB.
hwbunny 2y ago
If we could've preserved his brain for the future.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  In a bell jar?
  - hwbunny 2y ago
    In a digital rom.
dang 2y ago
I liked this one: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/DEC/dec.bell.no_output_division_C-I_TF;productivity_review.1982.102630376.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/DEC/dec.b... via Gordon Bell – The No Output Division (1982) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38490320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38490320 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)
- dcminter 2y ago
  As someone who attends a lot of meetings at the moment I smarted a bit reading that. I don't think any of them are "sewing circles" but still...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
sctb 2y ago
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.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
NYT obit https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/technology/c-gordon-bell-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.tk0.DZWu.6h3GnnGnux0P&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/technology/c-gordon-bell-...
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
From the Computer History Museum homepage: > 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.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  Extended CHM post: In Memoriam: Gordon Bell (1934–2024) https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-gordon-bell-1934-2024/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-gordon-bell-193...
- jhbadger 2y ago
  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.
- davidmurphy 2y ago
  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! Here he is speaking at a CHM event last year on Ethernet's 50th: https://youtu.be/T9On2L0-ObU?t=2267 https://youtu.be/T9On2L0-ObU?t=2267
- ericd 2y ago
  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.
leoc 2y ago
He was great on camera, for example as the presenter of the Computer History Museum's old Computer Pioneers: Pioneer Computers video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qundvme1Tik&list=PL14396C9538B4C234 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qundvme1Tik&list=PL14396C953...
- billylo 2y ago
  It's so humbling to understand the history and the ingenuity required to create these foundations. Amazing stuff.
dboreham 2y ago
Sad news. If readers haven't come across it already, recommend his book "Computer Engineering". Available still in print and also on the kindle platform. https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Engineering-Hardware-Systems-Design/dp/1483207676 https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Engineering-Hardware-Systems...
- dcminter 2y ago
  Also on bitsavers: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/_Books/Bell-ComputerEngineering.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/_Books/Bell-ComputerEnginee...
- whereistimbo 2y ago
  The Gordon Bell's webpage has the free pdf version as @DoctorR posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434375
Doctor-R 2y ago
Some of his books are available in pdf on his website: https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/gbvita.htm https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/gbvita.htm 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.
walterbell 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLifeBits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLifeBits > 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-Everything/dp/0525951342 https://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Memory-Revolution-Everyt...
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  And obligatory related HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425306
swozey 2y ago
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. Rest in peace
faeyanpiraat 2y ago
Breathing difficulties should never be the cause of death. I hope we are going to conquer these "simple" causes in the next couple of years.
awestley 2y ago
RIP. I loved the Computer Museum as a kid. It’s probably one of those thing that had a much bigger impact on me than I realize.
petesoper 2y ago
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.
fredsmith219 2y ago
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.
- kreddor 2y ago
  I think NTFS already supports it? The recent announcement seems to be for native git support.
panick21_ 2y ago
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. Condolences to all who knew him.
mproud 2y ago
TIL that’s why the black bar is at the top of the page.
benreesman 2y ago
"The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that are not there." - 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.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
I was really sad to hear he had passed. Since the first computer I ever programmed was a PDP-8/e I thought the guy who designed it must be a genius. When the Computer History Museum was being formed I gave them "1K" ($1024) and the person who collected that at the reception I was attending was Gwen Bell. I told her I admired Gordon's work and she called him over to say "Hi". We talked for about an hour about the PDP 8 and how the /E differed from the first 8 and the 8/I. Later, at a Vintage Computer Festival event Gordon was being honored and I worked with my Dad to gold plate an XR2242 front panel key which we then attached to a medal ribbon and presented to Gordon in a flip up Medal Presentation box. He got a great kick out of that. Definitely one of my heroes.
timoteostewart 2y ago
Not to be confused with Adam Gordon Bell, who is still very much alive. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=adamgordonbell https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=adamgordonbell https://adamgordonbell.com/ https://adamgordonbell.com/
Sontho 2y ago
A legend gone.

1257 points by dcminter 2y ago

As a side note, his personal page at https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/ https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/ doesn't seem to have been updated in more than ten years now. I believe it would make more sense to read "Gordon Bell (1934-2024)" instead of just "Gordon Bell".

pjmorris 2y ago

I've always loved 'The cheapest, fastest and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there.' -- Gordon Bell, as quoted in Jon Bentley's 'Programming Pearls.'

hnthrowaway0328 2y ago

I knew him through reading "Showstopper". What a loss!

smarks 2y ago

Here’s a link to Mashey’s post on mstdn: https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/112477330642538953 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.

smarks 2y ago
In the thread below his preview post, Mashey added the following (edited for typos): "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 https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/112477430691339073
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  > 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

toomuchtodo 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Bell

amirhirsch 2y ago

RIP. I had the pleasure of messaging with him while developing a PDP-11/70 hardware replacement 17 years ago.

KerrAvon 2y ago
Just curious, did you write that up anywhere? Sounds potentially interesting to this audience.
- amirhirsch 2y ago
  https://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2009/02/emulation-is-sincerest-form-of-flattery.html https://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2009/02/emulation-is-sinc...

jpgvm 2y ago

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. RIP.

pfdietz 2y ago
I wonder if that cookie recipe is written down somewhere. Gordon Bell practiced "lifelogging", so maybe!
- avagate 2y ago
  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: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gordon-bell-standing-shoulders-giants-vik-singh-ydlec/?trackingId=dIjTwgBaQ3OkSxCyS4e8eQ%3D%3D https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gordon-bell-standing-shoulder...
  - skottenborg 2y ago
    Interesting. Stephen Wolfram also wears a camera that snaps pictures every 20 seconds for special events. This is quite a read: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
    - Roritharr 2y ago

brian_herman 2y ago

Black bar for Bell please?

brian_herman 2y ago
Thanks Dang!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

dumpHero2 2y ago

Top obituary posts on hn: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=has%20died&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

f_allwein 2y ago
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…
- II2II 2y ago
  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.

workergnome 2y ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
I have no data, but I wish that to be true. What an amazing tribute.
inopinatus 2y ago
code 007, it's a secret
- kevindamm 2y ago
  Ah, hidden in plain sight, the seventh letter of the alphabet being G.
readthenotes1 2y ago
https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/page5.JPG https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-... 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...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kragen 2y ago
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/projects/codes/index.html#ASCII-1963 https://web.archive.org/web/20100414012008/http://wps.com/pr... https://landley.net/history/mirror/ascii.html#ASCII-1963 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_CodedCharSets.pdf#page=233 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/102702036 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 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/ 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 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

aap_ 2y ago

One of the most influential people in computer history. I'm glad I got to exchange a few mails with him a few years ago. RIP, GB.

hwbunny 2y ago

If we could've preserved his brain for the future.

pfdietz 2y ago
In a bell jar?
- hwbunny 2y ago
  In a digital rom.

dang 2y ago

I liked this one: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/DEC/dec.bell.no_output_division_C-I_TF;productivity_review.1982.102630376.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/DEC/dec.b... via Gordon Bell – The No Output Division (1982) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38490320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38490320 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)

dcminter 2y ago
As someone who attends a lot of meetings at the moment I smarted a bit reading that. I don't think any of them are "sewing circles" but still...
deleted 2y ago
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sctb 2y ago

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.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

NYT obit https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/technology/c-gordon-bell-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.tk0.DZWu.6h3GnnGnux0P&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/technology/c-gordon-bell-...

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

From the Computer History Museum homepage: > 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.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Extended CHM post: In Memoriam: Gordon Bell (1934–2024) https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-gordon-bell-1934-2024/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-gordon-bell-193...
jhbadger 2y ago
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.
davidmurphy 2y ago
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! Here he is speaking at a CHM event last year on Ethernet's 50th: https://youtu.be/T9On2L0-ObU?t=2267 https://youtu.be/T9On2L0-ObU?t=2267
ericd 2y ago
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.

leoc 2y ago

He was great on camera, for example as the presenter of the Computer History Museum's old Computer Pioneers: Pioneer Computers video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qundvme1Tik&list=PL14396C9538B4C234 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qundvme1Tik&list=PL14396C953...

billylo 2y ago
It's so humbling to understand the history and the ingenuity required to create these foundations. Amazing stuff.

dboreham 2y ago

Sad news. If readers haven't come across it already, recommend his book "Computer Engineering". Available still in print and also on the kindle platform. https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Engineering-Hardware-Systems-Design/dp/1483207676 https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Engineering-Hardware-Systems...

dcminter 2y ago
Also on bitsavers: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/_Books/Bell-ComputerEngineering.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/_Books/Bell-ComputerEnginee...
whereistimbo 2y ago
The Gordon Bell's webpage has the free pdf version as @DoctorR posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434375

Doctor-R 2y ago

Some of his books are available in pdf on his website: https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/gbvita.htm https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/gbvita.htm 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.

walterbell 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLifeBits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLifeBits > 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-Everything/dp/0525951342 https://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Memory-Revolution-Everyt...

TiredOfLife 2y ago
And obligatory related HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425306

swozey 2y ago

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. Rest in peace

faeyanpiraat 2y ago

Breathing difficulties should never be the cause of death. I hope we are going to conquer these "simple" causes in the next couple of years.

awestley 2y ago

RIP. I loved the Computer Museum as a kid. It’s probably one of those thing that had a much bigger impact on me than I realize.

petesoper 2y ago

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.

fredsmith219 2y ago

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.

kreddor 2y ago
I think NTFS already supports it? The recent announcement seems to be for native git support.

panick21_ 2y ago

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. Condolences to all who knew him.

mproud 2y ago

TIL that’s why the black bar is at the top of the page.

benreesman 2y ago

"The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that are not there." - 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.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

I was really sad to hear he had passed. Since the first computer I ever programmed was a PDP-8/e I thought the guy who designed it must be a genius. When the Computer History Museum was being formed I gave them "1K" ($1024) and the person who collected that at the reception I was attending was Gwen Bell. I told her I admired Gordon's work and she called him over to say "Hi". We talked for about an hour about the PDP 8 and how the /E differed from the first 8 and the 8/I. Later, at a Vintage Computer Festival event Gordon was being honored and I worked with my Dad to gold plate an XR2242 front panel key which we then attached to a medal ribbon and presented to Gordon in a flip up Medal Presentation box. He got a great kick out of that. Definitely one of my heroes.

timoteostewart 2y ago

Not to be confused with Adam Gordon Bell, who is still very much alive. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=adamgordonbell https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=adamgordonbell https://adamgordonbell.com/ https://adamgordonbell.com/

Sontho 2y ago

A legend gone.