In 1958, after returning to the USA from a Fulbright scholarship teaching computer design in Australia, Chester Gordon Bell enrolled in a Ph.D. program at his undergraduate alma mater, MIT. But Bell was lured by Digital Equipment Corporation to drop out of school in 1960 and become DEC’s second-ever engineer. There, he contributed to the architecture of the PDP-1, PDP-5, and PDP-11 minicomputers and was the principal architect of the PDP-4 and PDP-6. The PDP-1 was DEC’s first computer, and although only about fifty were manufactured, it paved the way for the commercial success of later models.

After a six-year hiatus to teach at Carnegie Mellon University, Bell returned to DEC in 1972 as vice president of engineering. During this stint, Bell co-architected and oversaw the development of the VAX series of “superminicomputers,” as DEC referred to them. Along with the PDP line, the VAX computers were so successful, they led DEC to become the industry’s second biggest computer manufacturer.

In 1983, Bell had a heart attack, which he blamed on the stress of working for DEC’s often overbearing co-founder, Ken Olsen. Bell retired from DEC — but his career stretched on for decades more. He went on to be an assistant director at the National Science Foundation; vice president of research and development at Ardent Computer; and principal researcher at Microsoft, where he championed lifelogging — recording and storing every aspect of one’s life digitally.

Bell also co-founded what is now the Computer History Museum of Mountain View, California; established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize to honor innovations in high-performance computing; and was granted the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1991. He died at 89 from pneumonia.