RIP Gordon Bell

Ars Technica informs us that Gordon Bell, an architect of our digital age, dies at age 89:

Computer pioneer Gordon Bell, who as an early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) played a key role in the development of several influential minicomputer systems and also co-founded the first major computer museum, passed away on Friday, according to Bell Labs veteran John Mashey.

Digital (not to be confused with Digital Research) was at one point the biggest vendor of mini computers. Gordon Bell played a key role into the development of these products that led to the PDP-11, the computer on which UNIX was developed, and the VAX. Every PC architecture is an evolution of the PDP-11 whose design principles trickled down to micro computers.

Today the two major operating system families are in one way of the other coming from digital.

1. macOS and Linux (including Android) are decendents of UNIX that was developed at Bell Labs (no relation) on a Digital PDP-11.

2. Windows in its current form is a decendent of Windows NT which was developped by a team engineer from Digital led by Dave Cutler (the original team was small). Dave Cutler did lead the engineering of VMS, the operating system for VAX mini computers that Gordon Bell overseeed, and did take some inspiration for Windows NT.