Gordon Bell - Honors

Honors

Bell is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994), American Association for the Advancement of Science (1983), Association for Computing Machinery (1994), IEEE (1974), and member of the National Academy of Engineering (1977), National Academy of Science (2007), and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (2009).

He is also a member of the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard and a member of the Sector Advisory Committee of Australia's Information and Communication Technology Division of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.

Bell was the first recipient of the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, in 1992. His other awards include Fellow of the Computer History Museum, honorary D. Eng. from WPI, the AeA Inventor Award, the Vladimir Karapetoff Outstanding Technical Achievement Award of Eta Kappa Nu, and the 1991 National Medal of Technology by President George H.W. Bush. He was also named an Eta Kappa Nu Eminent Member in 2007.

In 2010, Bell received an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree from Carnegie Mellon University. The university referred to him as "the father of the minicomputer".

Bell co-founded The Computer Museum, Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife Gwen Bell in 1979. He was a founding board member of its successor, the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California, in 1999 and was inducted as a Museum Fellow in 2003. 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 B.C. to the present.