Gordon Bell

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Gordon Bell joined Microsoft Research in 1995, where he worked on Telepresence—“being there, while being here, at possibly some later time.” This work included exploring multimedia in the home. In 1999, he began what became the project to capture all of life’s bits digitally.

MyLifeBits was a personal transaction-processing database for everything. Gordon captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, presentations, music, home movies, and videotaped lectures. His collection also included recordings of phone calls, IM transcripts, years of email, web browsing, and daily activities captured by the SenseCam. One of the challenges of MyLifeBits was building rich applications to encourage people to take their personal memorabilia out of the shoebox and store them digitally for all kinds of future usage, including the pursuit of digital immortality. Gordon co-authored a book with Jim Gemmell called Total Recall (opens in new tab). Released in 2009, the book served as a culmination of their thoughts and experiences during the project.

Gordon’s previous roles included serving as vice president of research and development at Digital Equipment Corporation (1960–1983), where he contributed to the design of the first minicomputers and time-shared computers; professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University (1966–72); founding assistant director of the National Science Foundation’s Computing and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) Directorate (1986–1988); panel chair of the National Research and Education Network (NREN) for creating the Internet (1987–1988); advisor and investor to more than 100 high-tech start-up companies; and a founding trustee of the Computer History Museum (opens in new tab) in Mountain View, California (successor to The Computer Museum, Boston). In 1988, he established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for parallelism; in 2015, David Cutler (Microsoft) and Bell established the ACM Cutler Bell Prizes for high school students. He was a member of the ACM, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, IEEE, NAE, NAS, and a 1991 National Medal of Technology medalist.

His interests included extreme lifelogging, digital lives, preserving everything in cyberspace, and cloud computing, including High Performance Computers as a new (post-2000) computer class or platform characterized by Bell’s Law. He advocated for Jim Gray’s Fourth Paradigm of Science.