A Head For Detail

Gordon Bell will never forget what I look like. He'll never forget what I sound like, either. Actually, he'll never forget a single detail about me. That's because when I first met the affable 72-year-old computer scientist at the offices of Microsoft Research Labs, in Redmond, Washington, he was carefully recording my every move. He had a tiny bug-eyed camera around his neck, and a small audio recorder at his elbow. As we chatted about various topics--Australian jazz musicians, his futuristic cell phone, the Seattle area's gorgeous weather--Bell's gear quietly logged my every gesture and all my blathering small talk, snapping a picture every 60 seconds. Back at his office, his computer had carefully archived every document related to me: all the email I'd sent him, copies of my articles he'd read, pages he'd surfed on my blog. "Oh, I've got everything," Bell said cheerily. And when I saw him the next day, down in his cramped personal office in San Francisco, he offered to give me a glimpse of the memories he'd collected. He plunked down in front of his computer, pulled up a browser, typed in "Clive Fast Company," and there they were: Hundreds of pictures of the meeting scrolled by on his screen, and the sound of our day-old conversation filled the room. It was a deeply strange feeling. My random chitchat is being preserved? He nodded, pointing to a mundane Dell computer parked beneath his desk. Because I'm not the only thing Gordon Bell will never forget. His goal is never to forget anything.