[MUSIC] Gordon Bell has had a long and varied
career. An early employee of Digital Equipment
Corporation, designer of many of DEC's PDP series of
minicomputers, leader in computer science at the National
Science Foundation, long-time proponent of the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View, California, and the creator and funder of the Gordon
Bell prize, which annually the ACM awards for improvements
to parallel and scalable computing. Today he's a researcher emeritus at
Microsoft. I recently met with Bell at the Computer
History Museum in front of a fully restored and
operational PDP-1. >> Well the PDP-1 is the first computer that I really did engineering on, maybe
it's the second. Because I got the Digital from MIT. where they had a machine called the TX-0,
which was the forerunner, in fact maybe the prototype, for the PDP-1,
that was designed at Lincoln Laboratory. First transis, one of the first
transistorized computers. And I had built a tape control unit for
this. What I needed was all these modules,
flip-flops, AND gates, OR gates, all the component things that are so
low-level to a computer scientist. These are these are, you know, tiny areas
of a piece of silicon. Those were the components, and so I went to Digital, who was selling
components, to buy those. And so I bought, I don't know, 50 of them and put them together to make a tape
control unit. At that time I was starting down the
Ph.D route. I was a staff engineer doing speech research and so we needed the tape
unit just to get more speech and more I/O, but what I did was a speech unit analysis system called Analysis by
Synthesis, which is still, the paper by the way was the first
one of these and still referred to because it's a technique
for, you know, now you'd call it an AI
technique. It was a way of understanding what was
going on in the vocal tract, and, anyway, what I learned from that was that basically I didn't want to be a
researcher. That I really was an engineer, and
certainly above all, I didn't want be a speech researcher,
because I said, you know, it was, I, I've experienced this with two or three
speech researchers since that time. One of them was telling, describing this,
as an AARPA contractor he was going to conquer speech, and anybody
who prize, looks at speech and you say my god, I can
kind of recognize that that, why I should be able to write a
program. And so I basically said okay, where,
I'll, where do you want us to send the Nobel Prize [LAUGH]
when you do that? And there was just, and so I got out. I said it was going to take 20 years to do
it, and I was wrong by 40 I was wrong. It took about, actually we did make
progress by 80s, by early 80s there was some voice
recognition. >> Some early generation PCs had some
voice recognition. >> Yeah, in about that time, but to get to
the point where we are now is taking. >> So you were buying components
>> We were buying. >> How big was a flip flop? Was it like this big? >> A flip flop, actually a flip flop was
on a board about this big. Or, I think, depending on the speed and
what it would do. But, I think we could get maybe two to
four flip flops. If they were shift registers you could get
more, but if they were, you know, JK, RS, the full bore, you know, maybe
just get one of them. And those are running at, the DEC modules at that time were running at at five
megahertz. So these are all five megahertz, I
enjoyed the, the building of the program, to do
analysis by synthesis, the building of the hardware,
making all of that work, and then the building of the
tape unit. And, but I had really wanted to do the engineering aspect and so I've basically
spent my life mostly thinking as an engineer. In fact,
I'd say over the last 10 years I've been an
accidental researcher. [LAUGH] I did, you know, I've been
responsible for, for managing research in a, you know, overall I was head of R and D at
Digital Equipment Company. But fundamentally I, my aspirations and my activities were all directed to
getting, to building things in volume that people
would want to use. >> So tell us a little bit about this PDP-1
and how its building sort of triggered, I mean was it, did it end up triggering
things that you didn't intend? >> I think any time you build a new
component, a new component is introduced, it opens up totally new doors. The interesting thing about the PDP-1 as
the, as I'd say it's a forerunner for the minicomputer and we could go look
at what a minicomputer. What I define a minicomputer is. This is 1960. By 1965, we built a thing that was, I would, I, that I claim is the first classical minicomputer, and the reason it's that is although this was a component, was used as a component in some
sense, the classical mini was actually built as a component. It was to be used for something else. And I'd say the big, big thing you should
take away from that, this is, that in every generation, you get a machine,
a computer that is a component. The microprocessor, as it was first came
out, was a component. Once it got, the microprocessor got a
little bit bigger, the PC, that began to be used as a component. In fact, what we just talked about was
this guy here. The cell phone is now a component. This is the most amazing component you
could ever get. You know, we would never have thought of
that as a component. Because what's in it is, gee, I've got,
maybe 32, 64 gigabytes of secondary storage that'll
store everything. It's got enormous processing power. It's got miniradios in it. [LAUGH]. And it's got an accelerometer. It's got a, a GPS unit and guess what? Who wants one of those? Well the, all of these nCopter things,
the, the Geocopter three, the three-blade thing, the
four-blade, the six-blade. There's a, I saw a 12-blade that carries
people the other day. All of those things are controlled by this
being the central part of that. >> In a sense, when you first build
something like that one >> I did. >> You need to keep it flexible. >> Yeah. >> Because you don't know what
exactly its purpose is. >> Absolutely, this. The beautiful thing that, the fun we had
with the PDP-1 and I can, could go back and open the door there and show
you, was the I/O system. The thing that, in fact the first
documentation I did on, about the PDP-1 was I wrote a book, not a book,
a 32-page manual, about how to connect stuff to the PDP-1
because I, that we were enamored with. How do you connect to that? And then the difference between the PDP-1
and then subsequent machines that we built were really, the I/O got
much more flexible, it got easier to use. So that when somebody could read that
manual they'd say, oh my god, I'm going to connect that
to a process control, I'm going to connect it and make it an
oscilloscope, I'm going to make it a pulse height
analyzer. And so in a sense, what the minicomputer did it
enabled the computer to be used as a component in sort
of everything, and that's where it was. And you know, I just wrote an article
about the birth and death, birth and, I guess, I don't remember,
rise and fall, rise and fall of the minicomputer and basically the editor, you know I went back and forth with the editors but what happened
was I had to, to say look, the function that we were creating here had not, there
was nothing like it in the past. It wasn't, wasn't a scaled-down mainframe
that you could interact with. That wasn't the goal that we had. It wasn't a, so it wasn't a record keeper. It wasn't a computer in the sense of a
supercomputer. We, we weren't after numbers, and we
weren't after bits and keeping records. We were after a component that could be
used in any number of ways and it ended up being
used to do message switching that have telegraph
lines coming in and, and telegraph lines going out, which is the core part
of, of networking today. The Internet, it all works on having
computers that have bits coming in and out and moving
them around. And it was also the ability to have analog sensing information from some of the first
things, we were sensing body information. So we were sensing things that people were
carrying on them. I normally wear a strap here that has,
senses my my heatflux and skin resistivity and
stuff. A thing called a BodyMedia. >> Right. So that. >> A body bug. >> The underlying thing is these are
flexible systems. To be hacked in ways that you couldn't
anticipate. >> That's right. And the idea was to make these systems as
flexible as possible, and so that they could be
interconnected to, and so. >> A toy chest for engineers, basically. >> Yeah. So basically, I. The thing that's been the most, I'd say
the, I've had the most fun with is sort of thinking about buses
and connecting things over my lifetime. So, in this one we had a, a core, you
know, processor memory, and some I/O, and then wires
radiated to connect to other things. And then made a, and actually, the
PDP-5 which was this, I'd say the forerunner
of the 8, was basically a single wire that ran out, and
you attached things to that. And then when we made the PDP-11 we had a
single wire for everything, into all all memories and processors and everything
connected to that, to that wire. And by that way, when we introduced
Ethernet, because Ethernet, the first Ethernet had was a single wire
and you connected computers to that wire. And I said, basically at that time I said
the Ethernet is the unibus of the 80s. In fact, that was and so it was a
two-and-a-half kilometer wire and, and you ran that wire all around and
you just connected things to that wire and, and did your, and, and made this
big system. >> Talk about how this became perhaps the first video game, would
you say it is? >> Yeah, well, the interesting thing about that as being
the first video game was, Harlan Anderson, one of the founders I think, had
discovered at the end of the year that he could give a computer away and get
total tax deduction for that and I think it, I
don't know that, whether that was the thing that
made us profitable that year or not. But in fact we were, we did, we gave. I don't know, a number, I don't know what number it was, but a very early PDP-1 to
MIT. And so right next door to the TX-0, the
transistorized computer's ancestor, we put a PDP-1 in that, that next
door room. And, and all of the students came in there. Steve Russel and Peter Sampson, Allen
Kotok came in and took a lot, took a lot of the software ideas that had been developed for PDP-1, and transformed them
onto the that was on the TX-0, put them on PDP-1,
and that, things like all the first editor, which we
called Expensive Typewriter, debugging, interactive
debugging, all the light pen kinds of interactions,
connections, and then the, I think the most famous one that is
still in a sense in use is, was Spacewar. And Spacewar has been used for years to
arbitrate different legal aspects of, you know, when did you,
you know, a lot of people say, I invented this by that time,
and you generally will find that's, find the, some function like
that in Spacewar. [MUSIC]