Gordon Bell is a senior researcher in Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC), San Francisco, CA. He is putting all of his atom- and electron-based bits in his local Cyberspace, in the MyLifeBits project.

Bell has an SB and SM degree from MIT (1956-57) and honorary D. Eng. from WPI (1993). 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. He led the National Research and Education Network (NREN) panel that became the NII/GII, and was an author of the first High Performance Computer and Communications Initiative. He continues to be interested in policies and technology that affects its development. Beginning in 1987 he sponsored "The Gordon Bell Prize" for Parallelism administered by a committee from the annual ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing.

Gordon has long evangelized scalable systems starting with his interest in multiprocessors (mP) beginning in 1965 with the design of Digital's PDP-6, PDP-10's antecedent, one of the first mPs and the first timesharing computer. He continues this interest in future supercomputing and especially clustered systems formed from cost-effective personal computers. As Digital's VP of R&D (1960-1982) he was responsible for DEC's products, including the VAX Computing Environment.

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. His awards include: the IEEE Von Neumann Medal, Fellow of the Computer History Museum, the AEA Inventor Award for contributions to the New England region, the IEEE 2001 Vladamir Karapetoff Eminent Member's Award of Eta Kappa Nu, and The 1991 National Medal of Technology.

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