Gordon Bell

Gordon Bell was an American electrical engineer who spent much of his career at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he designed the input output subsystem of the PDP-1, contributed to the architecture of the PDP-4, PDP-5, PDP-6 and PDP-11 minicomputers, and later led engineering on the VAX line of computers as vice president of engineering. In 1972 he described what became known as Bells Law of computer classes, the observation that a new category of computer, from mainframes to minicomputers to personal computers to mobile devices, tends to emerge roughly every decade to serve a new kind of use. He is often called the father of the minicomputer for this body of work.