Gordon Bell died this month.
I was a newcomer in the life of Gordon Bell. But it had a load impact on mine.
The first time I saw Gordon Bell was in 1984 out of a restaurant in a suburb of Boston when he stopped in a Porsche. I was the Marketing Chief of Mips Computer, a start of RISC chips. The entire company (five) came out visiting the east coast to meet Prime Computer, which would become our first important client. (When Gordon was CTO of Encore Computer, he encouraged the founders of MIPS to start the company, thinking they could provide the next processor for their multimax computer).
My world of computer science focused on the west coast had been limited to custom computers with bits scars, HP 2100 and 21mx, Interdata 8/32 mini computers and microprocessors Zilog. Gordon was already a legend, as Vice President of Research and Development in Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), designed some of the first mini-computer and supervised the creation of Vax 11-780. His work in DEC revolutionized the computer industry, making powerful computer science.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b5n0wt4kim
Thus, when we talked about dinner at the beginning, I could not understand a word that I was saying, until I realized that I had three or four levels of conversation going simultaneously, everything locked up. If I could keep them ordered, it was fun to keep up with each thread. By dessert I became another member of the Gordon Bell Fan Club.
Two years later, at a lunch in the center of Palo Alto, I met Gordon again. He was out to attend a meeting of the Teknowledge Board. I invited him to meet the founding team of Ardent, our new startup, whose founders he knew from the end of the day Gordon had joined our team as vice president of fundamental engineering and another phase in my education was about to begin.
As an entrepreneur of 20 and 30, I was lucky to have four extraordinary mentors, each brilliant in his own field and each decade or two older than me. While others taught me to think, it was Gordon Bell who taught me that Think about. I could see the lighter destination than anyone who has had. The best part of my day was to hear him tell me about 3 ideas at the same time and did the same with him. I had an extraordinary instinct to guide me away from the purely dumb roads that would not lead anywhere and pushed me on the most productive roads. (He had this warm laugh, a son of a smile when he listened to some of the most dumb ideas).
In the digital team, Gordon had developed a heuristic that tried to predict the evolution of the next class of computers. And when he left December, he created the diagnosis of Bell-Mason to help predict patterns in new successful companies. The idea that there was a pattern about the success and failure of the beginning in the back of my head for decades and shape the second half of my career. And while I was making a rain of ideas about some of the first ideas about what became his MyLifebits project, I was inspired to start a small version of his own.
During the next 15 years, Gordon would help me understand how to think critically about the possibilities on the horizon. However, at the same time, Gordon was looking forward, he was teaching us to respect and learn from the past.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qundvme1ik
Gordon and his wife Gwen began a computer history museum and in 1983 he transferred him to a warehouse renewed next to the Boston Children’s Museum. In 1986 I spent two weeks making a short film about the history of high performance computing in the museum. Gordon and Gwen put me in their guest room with a view to the port of Boston and a short walk along the bridge of Calle Congress to the Museum. This is not only my long -term love story with the museum, but also made me realize that the history of the computer and the history of innovation groups were losing the story of how the military and intelligence community had shaped the trajectory of the technology after World War II.
Seven years later, in my next UP, I would end up in his apartment again, this time with my wife and my two young daughters, to attend the Macworld Fair. I remember vividly that the girls ran around their room to be decorated with the artifacts that the museum had no space to exhibit (with Gwen they patiently tell that the arithmometer and the bones of Napier Hurds, we would retire.
When I started my final startup Epiphany, Gordon was in Microsoft, and became my most valuable advisor.
Gordon was not only a mentor and inspiration for me, but for countless engineers and computer. It was a privilege to meet him.
2004
I will miss it.
Filed in: Technology |