Gordon Bell, David Cutler, Ken Olsen

n the end, it was all about the joy of building something useful.

"In a funny way, with engineers, life is not more complicated than that. It's pretty simple," says network computing pioneer Gordon Bell of the common bond that brought him together with software engineer Dave Cutler and Digital Equipment founder Ken Olsen in an engineering adventure that produced the VAX minicomputer, the first system to deliver robust network computing to businesses.

Bell, who as a teenager growing up in Kirksville, Mo., wired farmhouses for electricity, was the engineering genius behind the VAX.

Raised in Dewitt, Mich. (population 800), Cutler,the brains behind the VAX's VMS operating system,built model airplanes as a boy and dreamed of being a pilot.

The entrepreneur of the group was Olsen, who as a teenager growing up in Connecticut read Popular Mechanics and built a radio, not knowing at the time that he'd eventually create a company with an absolute passion for engineering.

CREATORS OF THE VAX The two engineers and the entrepreneur were linked by a common vision: a desire to build a computer to help groups of workers across the globe collaborate. Together, Bell, Cutler and Olsen created and championed the VAX minicomputer, which heralded the age of distributed computing and made the early fortunes of Digital Equipment.

To truly appreciate the VAX, one must understand that the distributed computing concepts and breakthroughs that Bell, Cutler and Olsen made ultimately paved the way for the Internet.

The VAX, the original departmental workhorse servers, for the first time allowed executives or engineers worldwide to work on the same project, leveraging a vast computer network. Ford Motor, for example, used VAXes to allow engineers around the world to team up to design an automobile.

The VAX made Digital one of the world's most admired and respected companies.

"This technology has been likened to the impact that electricity had on our economy at the turn of the century," says Peter Koch, a 25-year Digital veteran who's now president and publisher of The Digital Alumni, a Digital employee newsletter and annual directory. "[The technology] has led to huge increases in productivity."

Koch calls VAX the initial spark that ignited the dramatic economic growth that the United States experienced at the end of the 20th century.

Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and co-founder of 3Com, says Bell, Cutler and Olsen "were the minicomputer's IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Cisco [Systems] all rolled into one."

"The VAX was the defining platform of the minicomputer generation," says Metcalfe, who arrived as a consultant at Digital after leaving Xerox's PARC lab in January 1979. "It turned loose thousands of developers [on VMS and Unix] to deliver the fruits of minicomputer computation," he says. "VAX, VMS and Ethernet were lethal together."

Although the Internet has made global communication second nature, it was only 23 years ago that Bell, Cutler and Olsen created a machine with software that made network computing possible.

It's no mistake that, as the head of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the late 1980s, Bell championed the Information Superhighway. In fact, Bell says his NSF work is one of his most-prized accomplishments. "It's the only plan I ever made that was accurate," he says.

Long before he was mapping out the possibilities of the Internet, however, Bell was imagining the possibilities for the next generation of minicomputers.

In the spring of 1975, in a small conference room in what was known as The Mill in Maynard, Mass., Bell assembled a handful of engineers to develop a follow-up to Digital's popular PDP-11 minicomputer.
The team ended up bringing a new 32-bit hardware architecture and operating system to market in less than three years. Engineers still marvel at the lightning pace of the development.

The VAX-11/780 minicomputer was radical new technology when it was introduced in October 1977. The system blew away engineers who were racing to bring computing to the masses. In Tracy Kidder's nonfiction best-seller, "The Soul Of A New Machine," it was the VAX that infuriated Tom West and his team of engineers at rival Data General.

	ACHIEVEMENTS
	Bell was the engineering genius, Cutler was the software whiz, and Olsen was the entrepreneur who would help bring their vision to market. Brought concept of minicomputers to life through Digital Equipment. The VAX-11/780 was introduced in October 1977. Cutler went on to lead enterprise operating system development at Microsoft. Bell championed the Information Superhighway in the late 1980s as head of the National Science Foundation. Olsen became chairman of Advanced Modular Solutions.

"The fact that one computer could operate with another computer on what I'll call equal footing was very unique with the VAX," says Bill Demmer, VAX program manager at Digital. "The VAX brought that concept to fruition, and it has become the basis of all computer networking in this day and age."

Demmer, who joined Digital after 17 years at IBM, says the computer-to-computer capabilities developed with the VAX could not have been done at IBM, "where the mainframe was the be-all and end-all." Individual engineering creativity was more prized at Digital than at IBM, where the marketing input was always based on "yesterday's technology so you didn't get new ideas driven by engineers," he says.

Demmer laughs when asked if two hard-driving engineers such as Bell and Cutler could have succeeded at IBM. "I don't think so," he says.

It was the engineering orientation created by Olsen that attracted Bell to Digital.

Bell had worked as a co-op student at General Electric and was disgusted by the sea of engineers working on tiny pieces of a large project. When he met Olsen, he was struck by Digital's intense focus on building interesting products. "My God, I thought, I can actually do something," says Bell, who still believes in the engineering principle that the most successful products are driven by a few people.

Bell, Cutler and Olsen say they were all inquisitive builders from an early age.

Bell, who spent a year in bed when he was seven years old because of a heart problem, says he used that time to think, experiment and build things.

Cutler fondly recalls visiting his grandparents when he was four and going to a lumber yard and collecting scrap wood, taking it home and then pounding nails into it, trying to build something. "I don't think I ever built anything very useful, but I sure used up a lot of nails," he says.

During the Great Depression, Olsen stripped parts out of radios to run experiments.

Today, the three boys with a passion for engineering who grew up in different parts of the country are still experimenting and building.

Cutler, 58, is leading a large team at Microsoft working on the company's landmark 64-bit version of Windows NT.

Olsen, 74, is still helping to build systems as the chairman,and one of the chief backers,of client/server systems maker Advanced Modular Solutions, Boxboro, Mass.

And Bell, 64, who joined Microsoft nine years ago to set up the software giant's first research laboratory, is still active at the company, where he's working on making the Internet home a reality. "The people I see who are the happiest are those who remain building," Bell says.

Within a month, Bells says he should be able to read the Internet version of The New York Times from his bed by projecting the pages on a wall.

Keep building, Gordon, keep building.