OBITUARY

Gordon Bell died on 17/05/2024.

Gordon Bell was elected as an ATSE Foreign Fellow in 2009.  

Over his time in the Fellowship, he was a member of multiple forums, including the Climate Change Forum, Energy Forum, Education Forum and Health Forum. 

He was among the first engineers to develop designs leading to the modern personal computer in the 1960s. In an era where computers were multimillion-dollar machines run by corporations, he had a vision of widespread and personal computing available to all. He worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, and later, Microsoft, and taught at Carnegie Mellon University. 

He received a Master’s degree from MIT, and then studied at the University of New South Wales under a Fulbright Scholarship, where he met his first wife Gwen Druyor and with whom he founded the Computer History Museum. Later in his career, he joined the National Science Foundation and worked on an early precursor of the internet through a project networking supercomputers. 

Gordon Bell has made outstanding technical contributions to the developement of computer architecture and high-performance computing, as well as research and development leadership in the minicomputer industry. As the founding Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation's Computing Directorate - CISE, he led the cross-agency panel for the National Research and Education Network (NREN) that planned the internet. He has continued to make contributions to information technology research and commercialisation in Australia following his Fullbright scholarship in 1957 and 1958. Beginning in 2000, his MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research was early work which helped found the field of Capture, Archival & Retrieval of Personal Experiences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Bell