Editing Gordon Bell (section)

===Entrepreneur and policy advisor===
Bell reportedly later came to find work at DEC stressful, and suffered a heart attack in March 1983. After he recovered and shortly after he returned to work, he resigned from the company in the summer.<ref name=":0" /> Afterwards, he founded [[Encore Computer]],<ref name=":0" /> one of the first shared memory, multiple-microprocessor computers to use the [[cache snooping|snooping cache]] structure.{{Cn|date=May 2024}}

During the 1980s he became involved with public policy, becoming the first and founding Assistant Director of the [[Computers and Information Science and Engineering|CISE]] Directorate of the [[National Science Foundation|NSF]], and led the cross-agency group that specified the [[National Research and Education Network|NREN]].

Bell also established the ACM [[Gordon Bell Prize]] (administered by the ACM and IEEE) in 1987 to encourage development in [[parallel computing|parallel processing]]. The first Gordon Bell Prize was won by researchers at the Parallel Processing Division of Sandia National Laboratory for work done on the 1000-processor [[NCUBE|nCUBE 10]] [[hypercube]].

He was a founding member of [[Ardent Computer]] in 1986, becoming VP of R&D in 1988, and remained until it merged with [[Stellar Computer Inc.|Stellar]] in 1989, to become [[Stardent Computer]].