C. Gordon Bell, creator of a personal computer prototype, dies at 89
C. Gordon Bell, a technology visionary whose computer designs for Digital Equipment Corporation fueled the emergence of the minicomputer industry in the 1960s, died Friday at his home in Coronado, Calif., at the age of 89 years.The cause was pneumonia, his family said in a statement.Called the "Frank Lloyd Wright of computers" by Datamation magazine, Bell was the leading architect in the effort to create smaller, more affordable, more interactive computers that could be grouped together in a network. A virtuoso of computer architecture, he built the first time-sharing computer and supported efforts to build Ethernet. He was among a handful of influential engineers whose designs formed the vital bridge between the room-sized models of the mainframe era and the advent of the personal compu...