RIP: Computer pioneer Gordon Bell

[More Cowbell]

Gordon Bell passed away at age 89 in Coronado, CA of pneumonia. Among his many accomplishments, he architected the DEC PDP and VAX minicomputers. In fact, UNIX was developed at Bell Labs on a PDP-7. Perhaps many on this forum also learned UNIX on a PDP or VAX. Respect to Gordon Bell for his pioneering efforts in computing!

Gordon Bell, an architect of our digital age, dies at age 89

 

[Route246]

Respected pioneer who went to battle against the IBM 360/370 dominance and his minicomputers competed nicely in the lower tier sectors at the time.

I was working in the chip industry when software was being ported to UNIX from various mainframe operating systems (IBM, Honeywell) and other minicomputer operating systems (Data General and others). It was a big deal back then because UNIX was so primitive, crashed a lot on memory errors and was not very reliable. It eventually became dominant with proprietary Sun/HP/DEC versions and then Linux, after making a few attempts became dominant on 32-bit x86 and eventually 64-bit x86 and the rest is history.

 

[misanman]

Gordon Bell was widely respected and admired. I worked for Digital back in the early days and thought the PDP architecture, especially the PDP-11 was great. It was a wonderful company. Followed along when they merged into Compaq (okay as well) and then HP (not so great, although the financial reward was good).