71–75 of 75 posts
The same day he dies, Microsoft announces version control in Windows Explorer, which he originally bought to the file system in VMS. I know he worked on NT, I wonder why they didn’t introduce version control before now.
Here’s a link to Mashey’s post on mstdn: https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/112477330642538953 It’s short enough that I’ll quote it here. “I am very sad to report death May 17 at age 89 of Gordon Bell, famous computer pioneer, a founder of Computer Museum in Boston, and a force behind the @ComputerHistory her in Silicon Valley, and good friend since the 1980s. He succumbed to aspiration pneumonia in Coronado, CA. I'm t…
In the thread below his preview post, Mashey added the following (edited for typos): "When I lead tours of Computer History Museum, I usually say there were 3 giants in the early decades of computer architecture: Gene Amdhal - mainframes Gordon Bell - minicomputers Seymour Cray - supercomputers and I was lucky to know the first two well, never met Cray." https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/112477430691339073
We lost Cray* to an untimely automobile accident. It'd be possible to have many fewer of those in the future, but that policy seems to be a much harder sell than I'd think it would be.
* when the Mac team bragged they'd used a Cray to design their latest version (heat flow simulation IIRC), Cray humblebragged back that he'd used a Mac to design his latest version.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like that your deep dive into whether this story might be true is the polar opposite of the "too good to check" impulse in journalism & social media, which instead tries to squeeze some attention & entertainment out of a pleasing story before doing any checks that might ruin the illusion.
The grandparent thought this was implausible, researched it as an outsider (with a slight bias towards thinking the claim is false, which is not a problem per se) and still didn't find any refutation. While I applaud the impetus behind the research, I'm more inclined to believe the apocryphal story after reading the attempt to refute it; not every piece of gossip will be supported by a written statement.
i wasn't attempting to refute the story. i was attempting to find out the truth, and i find your summary of that search as 'attempting to refute the apocryphal story' somewhat offensive
my summary of what i found is that the assignment of ^g to the bell control code happened before gordon bell was well-known, on a continent where he did not live, in the deliberations of a standards body he had no involvement with, revising a proposal from a company that competed with his company, before the construction of any software or hardware that used key-chords such as control+g to produce control codes
under these circumstances it is not impossible that one of bell's colleagues from dec made the proposal, or at least was motivated to advocate it by knowing him¹, but given that i couldn't turn up any involvement of dec or mit people in the standards process at all, much less in the delegation the usa sent to europe for the meeting where the change was made, it seems pretty unlikely
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¹ and predicting the invention of the control key, and that the proposal to start the alphabet at codepoint 64 instead of 65 would fail; but both of these seem to have been fairly predictable
My father worked with him at CMU and the story he always told (while possibly apocryphal) was that the reason that the ASCII bell character sequence was CRTL-G was because of Gordon.
it seems somewhat unlikely. let's follow the trail the existence of bell characters, of course, predates gordon bell's existence itself (they're in the ita2 baudot-murray code from 01932, two years before his birth) so what we're discussing is specifically the assignment of the ascii bell character to the control character corresponding to bell's middle initial it was already ^g in 01963 according to tom jennings's e…
> Gordon Bell (after lunch, it's wonderful having God and Marshall McHulan here to correct one's self) emailed:
> I did build/invent the first UART in '61, made the Ethernet deal with Intel and Xerox to have LANs, and DECnet was the first commercial implementation or ARPAnet, so I have had a long term interest in communcations.
> Every notice that the bell rings when you push ctrl g on the old teletypes?
> Also, built first commercial timesharing system.
From the Computer History Museum homepage: > REMEMBERING CHM COFOUNDER GORDON BELL > CHM is saddened to share the news that Museum cofounder and Fellow Gordon Bell passed away on May 17, 2024. Bell was a prominent American electrical engineer and computer scientist who made a tremendous impact on the world of computing—from handheld devices to supercomputers. Bell is in the pantheon of brilliant computer designers th…
In Memoriam: Gordon Bell (1934–2024)
https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-gordon-bell-193...