Gordon Bell

Computer pioneer Gordon Bell has been one of the industry’s leading figures for nearly 50 years. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994), American Association for the Advancement of Science (1983), ACM (1994), IEEE (1974), and Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (2009) and a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1977) and National Academy of Science (2007), Bell was also a founding board member of the Computer History Museum.

The following interview is based on an oral history conducted by Gardner Hendrie for the CHM in June 2005. (The full transcript is available in the CHM archive.¹)

Gardner Hendrie: Could you tell us a little bit about where you were born and your family and give a little background about your formative years?

Gordon Bell: I’m a fan of crediting everything to my parents and the environment that I grew up in. I was born in Kirksville, Missouri, on 19 August 1934. Kirksville was a college town and a farming community, with a population of about 10,000, and it hosted the Northeast Missouri State Teacher’s College, which eventually morphed itself into Truman State University. My father had an electrical contracting business and appliance store and did small appliance repair. I grew up working at “the shop” and spent my formative years in that environment.

Hendrie: What are the earliest memories you have of thinking about what you might want to do when you grew up?

Bell: I was one of the best electricians and appliance (e.g., dishwasher) repair persons in the town when I went to college. The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) program to electrify all the farms in the country had been established in the mid-1940s, so I did lots of house and building wiring. I installed industrial equipment and worked on all of that kind of stuff, such as appliances, buildings, houses, and industrial machinery.

Hendrie: Tell me about the things you did, what you studied. You obviously learned a lot from just working with your father. What did you study in high school?

Bell: What was really important was having a wonderful science teacher and a wonderful math teacher. I still remember both very fondly. At that point in time in Kirksville, Missouri, you didn’t take calculus since it wasn’t offered, but I took chemistry and physics and then geometry, trig, and (perhaps) solid geometry. Those were really critical to enable me to pass the SAT and go to MIT. At some point, maybe when I was 12 or so, I thought I wanted to be an engineer. I had no idea what an engineer was. I had books that I sort of read—Books of Knowledge and The Way Things Work—so I gleaned that somewhere, somebody figured out how to make these things work and that was the interesting thing, not repair. Repairing them was okay, but in fact, designing them or inventing them seemed like a lot more fun. So that was basically the course that I set fairly early, with no one telling me I should be doing this.

I really had no trouble at MIT even though one of my dad’s golf buddies who taught at the college advised me not to go there because I might fail. MIT was hard work, and I have nice memories about being there even though I can’t imagine being admitted now. I went into the co-op program because I wanted to understand what it was like to be an engineer.

Hendrie: So when you were approaching graduation, you must have been thinking about where you were going to go and what you were going to do. Did you ever think you wanted to continue an academic career, or did you want to go out and get a job?

Bell: The problem was the co-op experience had convinced me that I didn’t really know if I wanted to have a job living in a sea of desks with other engineers, so this is where serendipity kicked in. A really good friend and graduate year roommate, Bob Brigham (for whom my...