Gordon Bell has been working in the IT industry for nearly 50 years. He was a key engineer and vice president of research and development at minicomputer pioneer Digital Equipment Corp. for 23 years and later a founder of the Computer History Museum. Today Bell is a principal researcher at Microsoft Corp
In an interview with Computerworld, Bell talked about his favorite computer of all time, the state of telepresence and what he wishes people knew about his good friend and Microsoft research colleague Jim Gray who was lost at sea last year.
What has been the most influential change or product that you’ve seen over the years? Certainly, the big bang was the integrated circuit and the microprocessor. [Since] that hit in 1972 with the first microprocessor, we’ve been on this long-running exponential, Moore’s Law. Everything has been pretty predictable since then. It was really the integrated circuit that allowed the exponential increase in power.
What did you think we’d have by now but don’t? I started out in speech when I graduated from MIT. I thought we would be a little further ahead in being able to do speech recognition. Speech in particular has been a hard one.
What’s the one computer that best illustrates the 20th century? When you take it all together, it’s either the [IBM 360 mainframe] or the PC. [The mainframe] was the workhorse of computers for such a long time and continues to be. On the other hand, the thing that’s had the biggest impact has been the PC. The world population of PCs is in the billions. With the sheer numbers and the number of people’s lives it’s touched, it’s probably got to be the PC.
What has been your favorite computer of all time? For one that I was involved with, the VAX was the most successful. It was a joy to be involved with. It was a wonderful team. I’m very proud of what we produced. And for one that I wasn’t with, in a funny way it’s probably the IBM 360. I love Seymour Cray’s computers. I’d say it’s the vector processor. The Cray style of vector processor is one of the great inventions. It’s certainly underappreciated by most scientists. It just computes very fast. It was the workhorse for computing for, really, two decades. It was the workhorse from ‘75 to ‘95. It had a wonderful elegance to it and the way it works. It really was a spectacular piece of engineering.
