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(opens in new tab)The IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award is one of the industry's most prestigious honors. Friday, September 19th, the IEEE Computer Society announced the presentation of the 2014 award to Microsoft Researcher Emeritus Gordon Bell (opens in new tab), for "his exceptional contributions in designing and bringing several computer systems to market that changed the world of high-performance computing and of computing in general, the two most important of these being the PDP-6 and the VAX-11/780."
Among the many achievements in his distinguished career (opens in new tab), he has been vice president of research and development at Digital Equipment Corporation, founder of Encore Computer, a co-founder of Ardent Computer, and professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University. Bell has been an advisor and investor to more than 100 high tech start-up companies and a founding trustee of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
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Today we caught up with the man many in the industry call "father of the minicomputer (opens in new tab)."
Q: Outside of your own, which fields of computer science do you find most interesting to follow right now and why?
A: The constant evolution of digitizing everything is what I've watched and what I look at, so if you make me exclude that as my interest, I would be hard pressed to look around for something more interesting! Once digitized then the challenge is to derive utility or value; this is the big data hot bed.
Capturing, then understanding health data is something I feel is much needed and keenly interesting. We need to make sense of the data and exploit it for better healthcare using direct, personal feedback. I believe it will take a decade or more before we get there.
Q: Over the years, what developments have surprised you the most?
A: The rapid rise of the World Wide Web, given the state of the Internet in 1990. As an author of the plan to create a national research network in 1987, we had no idea or plan of what actually was to happen with increased network bandwidth, or simply the reduction of latency that allowed anywhere, anyone interactive connections. The Web was a wonderful surprise, right up there with the computer and integrated circuits. Also the ability to build and actually use the highly-parallel high-performance computing systems which evolved after the late 1980s.
Q: What personality traits do you think have helped you most in your career?
Persistence. Also being able to finding talented people who let me work with them. Having a few – and in my case, way too many – things or ideas in computing and being able to stick with a few of them until they pay off requires persistence.
Gordon Bell was the first recipient of the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, and also the recipient of the AeA Inventor Award, the ACM-IEEE Computer Society Eckert-Mauchly Award, the Eta Kappa Nu Vladimir Karapetoff Outstanding Technical Achievement, and the National Medal of Technology Award. He also founded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize.