While we are remembering Ken, I couldn’t help sending this picture of a poster that appeared in my office one Monday morning about 30 years ago that illustrated Ken’s sense of humor that most people never saw (see photo at bottom of this post).
This is something we shared, along with the concern about wanting to have beautiful computers and cabling. Unfortunately, I don’t have the text on the back of the poster that listed 20 reasons for the messy cables—e.g., “engineering said ‘marketing made me do it,'” and “we don’t ever want a customer to say that our cables are too short.”
Ken loved to work on the cabling and power supply problems for the DEC computers, a problem he and most every other company has never solved. He delivered a lot of the crisply burned out power supplies that customers sent him to my office.
Cabling has only gotten worse.
However, as a Ford board member, he claimed that he was able to get them to have a beautiful engine compartment and cabling (after he became a board member).
There are other things to recall as well. There’s the story of him wanting to redesign the famous, large, Yellow Ethernet cable just as we were to announce it!
I tend to remember all the humor and moments of irony that we shared while building computers at DEC.
Personally, I believe one of his longest living legacies will be the founding of The Computer (History) Museum(s) that started in Maynard, moved to Marlboro, then Boston for 15 years, and has lived in Silicon Valley for the last 15 years.
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[Editor’s note: The author spent 23 years at Digital Equipment Corporation as Vice President of Research and Development, where he was responsible for Digital’s products.]
Author: Gordon Bell
Gordon Bell is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Laboratory. He spent 23 years at Digital Equipment Corporation as Vice President of Research and Development, where he was responsible for Digital's products. He was the architect of various mini- and time-sharing computers and led the development of DEC's VAX and the VAX Computing Environment. Bell has been involved in, or responsible for, the design of many products at Digital, Encore, Ardent, and a score of other companies.
Bell has a BS and MS degree from MIT (1956-57), D. Eng. (hon.) from WPI (1993) and D.Sci and Tech (hon.) from CMU (2010). During 1966-72 he was Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University. In 1986-1987 he was the first Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation's Computing Directorate, CISE. He led the National Research and Education (NREN) Network panel that became the Internet and was an author of the first High Performance Computer and Communications Initiative.
Bell has authored books and papers about computer structures and start-up companies—as an advisor and/or investor to over 100 companies. In April 1991, Addison-Wesley published High Tech Ventures: The Guide to Entrepreneurial Success. In 2009, Dutton published Total Recall that describes the journey to storing one’s entire life that was written with Jim Gemmell. He is a founder and board member of the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA.
Bell is a member of various professional organizations including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Fellow), American Association for the Advancement of Science (Fellow), ACM (Fellow), IEEE (Fellow and Computer Pioneer), and the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technological Science and Engineering. His awards include: the Mellon Institute Medal, IEEE's McDowell and Eckert Mauchly Awards, the Von Neumann Medal, and The 1991 National Medal of Technology "for his continuing intellectual and industrial achievements in the field of computer design; and for his leading role in establishing ... computers that serve as a significant tool for engineering, science, and industry."
Mr. Bell lives in San Francisco and Sydney Australia with his wife, Sheridan Forbes.
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