Gordon Bell: Building Blocks of Computing

G ordon Bell has had a long and varied career: early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), designer of many of DEC’s PDP series of minicomputers, leader in computer science at the National Science Foundation, long-time proponent of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, and creator and funder of the Gordon Bell Prize, which ACM awards for improvements to parallel and scalable computing. Today, he’s a researcher emeritus at Microsoft. I recently met with Bell at the Computer History Museum in front of a fully restored and operational PDP-1. To watch the full interview, visit www.computer.org/ computingconversations.