COMPUTER PIONEERS : INDUSTRY ELDERS KEEPING UP BY LOOKING AHEAD.

Byline: Glenn Rifkin The New York Times

They are among the elders of the computer industry now, three men who, in fierce competition with each other, made the machines that ushered in the era of minicomputers - a quaint name for hardware that when compared with today's Chihuahua-sized laptops is about as ``mini'' as a Saint Bernard.

The men who, more than anyone, created the minicomputer industry more than two decades ago were C. Gordon Bell, 62, who spent 23 years at Digital Equipment; Tom West, 56, who, after 24 years, is still with Data General; and Horace Tsiang, 54, who left Wang Laboratories in 1990 after 21 years.

All three created machines that brought their companies billions of dollars and all three became independently wealthy. Then minicomputers, which provided business with a smaller, more flexible and inexpensive alternative to hulking mainframes, were in their turn displaced by the desktop computers once known as microcomputers.

In another era, the men whose ideas created and transformed an industry, be it automobiles, airplanes or television, would mature along with their creations over 30 years or so. But in computing, industries can mature and begin to wither into niche markets in less than a decade. A man's brainchild grows feeble faster than the man himself.

So how does one age gracefully in what sometimes seems the quintessential young man's business? These three men are all trying to find satisfaction and challenges in a culture that often sees knowledge of the past as a burden, not a blessing.

Bell, who joined Microsoft in 1995 after 12 years of moving from one project to the next, finds the answer is to make computers perform new feats. Bell and West, who had a brief run at fame when he was featured in Tracy Kidder's 1981 book ``The Soul of a New Machine,'' about the minicomputer wars, are trying to push their respective companies into the technological future.

Bell has come up with an idea for what he calls ``scalable network and platform computing,'' a new architecture intended to give a single desktop computer operator the computing power of a mainframe, a design that he immodestly predicts ``will totally change the industry by the year 2002.'' The sheer computing capacity of mainframes is still needed in many industries, and Bell envisions providing it by redesigning the current configurations of corporate computer networks.

West is trying to find technologies to get Data General into the Internet market. ``I don't get wrapped around the axle on business issues,'' West said. ``I'm not that interested in making money, but in building products that are in some way out ahead.''

Tsiang, the least known of the three outside the world of Route 128, the highway west of Boston that served as the main street of the Massachusetts computer industry, still keeps close tabs on computer science research, but at a distance.

Tsiang, who ran research and development at Wang Laboratories during its surge to nearly $3 billion in revenues in the 1980s, is now chief executive of First International Computer, a $1.3 billion notebook computer maker in Taipei, Taiwan, that builds notebook computers for customers like NEC, Texas Instruments and Sharp Electronics. He left Wang shortly after Dr. An Wang, the company's founder, died in March 1990.

In earlier years, Tsiang, a soft-spoken Shanghai native, spurned many lucrative offers to leave Wang. ``I worshiped Dr. Wang,'' Tsiang said. ``I never considered leaving.'' He said he declined to cash in any stock options during his stay, but received a seven-figure severance package upon leaving.

If there was any disappointment left from his years at Wang, it concerned what was left undone. He said that his research group had a string of potent product ideas beyond minicomputers - among them some early systems that allowed users to scan images into documents - but the infrastructure of the company was so geared to the previous product line that switching was impossible. ``Even if you had the products, it was irrelevant; nobody could make the transition,'' he said.

Still, he stayed at Wang until Wang died. By contrast, Bell was far more peripatetic. His goal was to continue in the innovation business, defying conventional wisdom, as expressed by George Colony, president of Forrester Research, a technology research firm in Cambridge, Mass.

Colony argues: ``What's happened before is meaningless, if anything it could weigh you down. On the pure inventive, creative side, a clean slate is more valuable.''

But in his new offices at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco, Bell ``pumps out ideas as well as anybody,'' said Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's 36-year-old group vice president of application and content. ``He's not sitting around pining for the good old days when men were men. He's more apt to be looking forward 10 years.''

The architect of Digital's hugely successful VAX line of minicomputers in the 1970s, Bell said he joined Microsoft to ``continue to be a part of the next paradigm shift.''

Like Tsiang, he left the company he grew up in after a personal crisis - in his case, a 1983 heart attack. After he left, Bell remained active in the industry, founding another company before leading the National Science Foundation's Information Superhighway initiative in the late 1980s and writing a book on venture capital. He made a trade-off: in return for less power, he wanted minimal stress and maximum freedom to create.

Not that he isn't competitive. More than 15 years after the fierce rivalry between his team and West's, Bell is annoyed at being grouped with his former rivals. He said dismissively that Kidder made West into a hero on a project that was ``chasing VAX and lost big.'' He calls Wang ``a fluke.''

For West, Kidder's 1981 book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, was a decidedly mixed blessing. It had what he calls a ``disquieting'' effect on his life, putting him in an uncomfortable spotlight. His marriage broke up shortly after its publication and he faced heightened expectations throughout his career. ``I preferred obscurity,'' he said.

For the moment, he continues to do research at Data General, a once mighty, now humbled computer maker in Westboro, Mass., but no longer runs the research and development department. He has spent the past two years seeking a role for the company in the Internet market.

``People keep asking me what keeps me here,'' West said. ``Lack of imagination, failure to get on with life? I didn't grow up with the notion that you had to have a series of affairs in life in order to optimize your experiences.''

The three minicomputer giants for which the three men worked stumbled in the late 1980s in the face of the PC revolution.

It was a startling end to an era that many compared to the Wild West. West recalls the excitement of minicomputer battles, the 18-hour days and intense competition as ``a thrill.'' Today, he said: ``A job is only a means to an end. I like to leave it behind. I don't want to do this seven days a week for the rest of my life.'' He prefers sailing.

When he looks at the new generation of strivers, he sees a disheartening lack of commitment to larger goals. ``It's much easier to turn ideas into products than it ever was,'' he said. ``But if five guys in a garage turning out a clever screen saver is all you do, you wind up with the hula-hoop phenomenon and important structural changes don't occur.''

Bell does not agree with the notion that computing is a young man's game. ``Good ideas come from everywhere,'' he said. He noted that David Cutler, one of his former Digital engineers, built Windows NT for Microsoft at 52.

When Myhrvold recruited Bell, he welcomed the sense of history Bell brought with him. ``One thing that is very valuable in computing but very rare is having some sense of the past,'' he said. ``Technology moves so rapidly and most of the people are very young. There are a tremendous number of lessons from the past that are lost on people because they don't have the depth of experience.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1--Color) C. Gordon Bell, 62, who spent 23 years at Digital Equipment, now is coming up with ideas for Microsoft.

(2) Tom West, 56, has been working for Data General for 24 years.

The New York Times