My Eulogy for Gordon Bell

Gordon Bell is in the pantheon of great figures in computing.  His recent passing is a great loss to our community, though to quote from the official obituary, in classic Gordon style, “Old computer pioneers never die, they just lose their physical bits.” Gordon spent a good part of the last portion of his life recording everything, saving those non-physical bits. As many have noted, the camera around his neck was a constant sight and something quite unique when he first started wearing it. I was fortunate to know Gordon for around 30 years and he had a big impact on me.

Gordon was one of those incredible geniuses who not only knew a lot about a lot of things, but could also use that knowledge to foresee things around the corner in a manner most people couldn’t. He was that rare combination who was both a thinker and a doer. Gordon was talking about the revolution that would be created by personal computing long before others. He talked about computers eventually becoming “bumps in the cables“. That is, that computers would eventually become so small and cheap they would be embedded in everything and disappear. Here we are today, in just that world.

Gordon was so smart that his words literally couldn’t keep pace with his thoughts. I remember the first few times I met him, I thought he couldn’t complete a sentence. But he was just too impatient. Gordon knew exactly what he was thinking, and it was generally brilliant. He just wanted to get onto the next thing and couldn’t wait to finish the entire sentence. This, combined with his generally cantankerous and blunt temperament, intimidated a lot of people. But Gordon was a gentle human being, kind to the core and always willing to help. A rare combination of humility, humanity, and humungous IQ.

Gordon was a man of action. An engineer’s engineer.   One of the first of many notable quotes I remember from Gordon is “If you can’t think of something to do, do something!“ Of course, Gordon never just thrashed about randomly. But he recognized that, particularly with new technology, we generally don’t have enough information to pick the optimal course. He used to say, in a phrase borrowed from complexity theory, one should pursue hill climbing. Find the next best place you can, based on what you currently understand. Learning by doing teaches you much more than you will learn by perseverating.

Gordon did so many amazing things that it’s hard to say which were the most important. Most know of him because of his work for Digital Equipment Corporation, and particularly his work on the VAX computing architecture. However, in my mind, one of the most important things Gordon did for humanity was to spend two years at the National Science Foundation (NSF). During his tenure, put in motion processes and organization that would take the Internet from an early research program to the point where it could be turned over to private industry in the early 90s. It’s one of those somewhat invisible, thankless jobs that was critical in creating the world in which we live today.

Gordon also wrote a great book called High-tech Ventures. It was the first time I read something that really made sense of startups. And it was written when startups were still a new thing. It’s also the first time I saw a radar plot, those circular visualizations that are extremely helpful in visualizing multi-dimensional data. Another example of Gordon’s ability to take complex ideas and communicate them effectively.  And it was right around this time that I first heard Gordon utter that famous phrase “A demo is worth 1000 pages of PowerPoint“. Again, this circles back to his understanding that new technology and new companies couldn’t be invented on paper. The ideas needed to be worked out through construction.

Ultimately, we celebrate people through stories.  Here are a few of mine:

One time, when reviewing some startup company ideas and their associated plans, Gordon just about blew a gasket. I’m sure he said this many times, but he flew into a rage and screamed, “Revenues are dreams, expenses are realities. All these plans have these fanciful revenue plans and no mechanisms for controlling expenses!“ Sage words. Every startup plan has a hockey stick revenue forecast with expenses trailing far behind and profits looming large. Usually, it doesn’t work out that way. 

Another classic Gordon moment was at a meeting of senior executives in the 1990s where a panel of airline executives talked about how it was impossible to do anything in their industry except on mainframes. They insisted this was the only way you could keep up with the demands of subsecond responses to reservation requests. Gordon stood up, with hands flying all over the place, and gave a harangue that he could run the entire system out of servers he could fit in the bathroom of his house. He could see clearly how much computing power had already advanced, and that what was limiting these systems was not computing power, but the difficulty of change in large-scale organizations. 

The last story I’ll tell comes from the late 1990s, when Gordon and I were asked to play point/counterpoint on the penetration of broadband Internet access over the next 5–10 years at a conference. I was asked to take the optimistic view that it would happen more quickly. Gordon, always the skeptic, took the pessimistic view, and we had a lively debate. He made several memorable points about the difficulty of telephone companies getting out of their own way and getting on with the infrastructure that would be needed to roll out high-speed access at scale. He also pointed out that consumers would not be so demanding because they wouldn’t really understand what was possible. He was, of course, right as usual.

Let us continue to celebrate the immense contributions of Gordon Bell to the computing industry and beyond. Let us honor his legacy by doing things and learning as quickly as we can how to make the most productive use of the incredible technological advances during our lifetimes. Let us remember to be humble and to stand on the shoulders of the giants who created our industry. Let us try to emulate those great qualities that Gordon demonstrated so consistently throughout his life.