Gordon Bell

Entrepreneur and policy advisor Bell reportedly later came to find work at DEC stressful, and suffered a heart attack in March 1983. After he recovered and shortly after he returned to work, he resigned from the company in the summer. was first described in 1972 with the emergence of a new, lower priced microcomputer class based on the microprocessor. Established market class computers are introduced at a constant price with increasing functionality and performance. Technology advances in semiconductors, storage, interfaces and networks enable a new computer class (platform) to form about every decade to serve a new need. Each new usually lower priced class is maintained as a quasi independent industry (market). Classes include: mainframes (1960s), minicomputers (1970s), networked workstations and personal computers (1980s), browser-web-server structure (1990s), palmtop computing (1995), web services (2000s), convergence of cell phones and computers (2003), and Wireless Sensor Networks aka motes (2004). Bell predicted that home and body area networks would form by 2010.

Legacy and honors Bell has been described as "a giant in the computer industry",

Bell was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1977 for contributions to the architecture of minicomputers. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994), The story of the museum's evolution beginning in the early 1970s with Ken Olsen at Digital Equipment Corporation is described in the Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR-2011-44, "Out of a Closet: The Early Years of The Computer * Museum". A timeline of computing historical machines, events, and people is given on his website. It covers from prehistoric times to the present.

Books (with Allen Newell) Computer Structures: Readings and Examples (1971, ) (with C. Mudge and J. McNamara) Computer Engineering (1978, ) (with Dan Siewiorek and Allen Newell) Computer Structures: Principles and Examples (1982, ) (with J. McNamara) High Tech Ventures: The Guide for Entrepreneurial Success (1991, ) (with Jim Gemmell) Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution will Change Everything (2009, ) (with Jim Gemmell) Your Life Uploaded: The Digital Way to Better Memory, Health, and Productivity (2010, ) (a retitled edition of Total Recall)

Articles Bell, Gordon, and Jim Gray. "Digital immortality." Communications of the ACM 44.3 (2001): 28-31. Note: the article was also published on the official website of Microsoft Research.