[HN Gopher] George Goble has died
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George Goble has died
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Goble
Author : finaard
Score : 88 points
Date : 2026-04-02 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.legacy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.legacy.com)
| finaard wrote:
| His obituary or wikipedia page are well worth a read for what he
| was involved in - though he probably is best known for lighting a
| BBQ in under 5 seconds by use of liquid oxygen, and getting into
| trouble with the local firedepartment for that.
|
| He used to have that video on his website - which I've discovered
| via a Usenet discussion not too long after it happened. It was
| one of the first videos I've downloaded via a web browser, and
| almost certainly the first video made with a digital camera I've
| ever seen.
| sponaugle wrote:
| George was really into video stuff - he had stacks of 8mm video
| tapes in his office, and of course stacks of exabyte drives. He
| had many different cameras and was always trying new ones out.
| He was also a really early adopter of laserdiscs, and I have a
| few discs he gave me when I graduated.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Any chance all of that will be sent to the Internet Archive
| or Archive Team?
| tantalor wrote:
| Lighting a charcoal grill with liquid oxygen:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjPxDOEdsX8
| sponaugle wrote:
| I was holding the camera for some of these videos. Such a great
| time!
| gorgoiler wrote:
| It reminds me of a comment I once read about how alien
| visitors, upon arriving on Earth, would be appalled to see how
| we live our lives at the bottom of a giant gaseous ocean of 20%
| oxygen.
|
| Almost everyone and everything around us of any importance is
| one mishap away from going disappearing in a hot, sooty flame.
| dekhn wrote:
| For another perspective on this, see the book Shroud
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_(Tchaikovsky_novel)),
| there is all sorts of nifty commentary on oxygen related to
| your point.
|
| (it's a great book in general, but the bit about our use of a
| volatile gas for a living environment is pretty neat)
| sponaugle wrote:
| Sad to hear! I worked for George for all of my undergraduate time
| at Purdue. He was an amazing boss with such a passion for all
| things unix. For a while he had the UNIX license plate on his
| minivan.
| housel wrote:
| I worked for him as well, from 1988 through 1990. He mentored
| me as I helped sysadmin various BSD machines the university was
| beta-testing (CCI Tahoe and Gould NP-1), and supervised my work
| fixing bugs in the Berkeley Pascal compiler. It was fun
| watching him put his early-model Motorola cell phone into
| service mode and tweak register values... while he was driving.
| And of course I enjoyed finding him in his office at all sorts
| of weird hours and listening to him rant about various
| technical topics.
| SirFatty wrote:
| He was great in "The Birds and the Bees".
| svggrfgovgf wrote:
| Wrong George Goble - this is the computer scientist not the
| actor.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| George's personal home page (seems to be a mirror:
| https://www.bkinzel.de/misc/ghg/index.html) with the grill
| lighting video and the TWINKIES experiments (original site gone,
| but archived:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20060101093459/http://www.twinki...)
| were amazing web sites in the late 90s.
| runjake wrote:
| For you youngsters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Goble
| nullbyte808 wrote:
| "A striking example of his forward-thinking occurred years ago on
| a beach in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where George-sitting on the
| sand with a laptop connected via his cell phone-became one of the
| first people to read email over a mobile connection to a computer
| at Purdue. As a friend noted, "This was a real bit of history...
| At the time Apple had a whole engineering team trying to do this
| and here's George on the beach making it happen.""
|
| Amazing. RIP.
| finaard wrote:
| The archived copy of his old website has a picture from the
| beach:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20000511210957/http://ghg.ecn.pu...
|
| That's the page mostly dedicated to BBQ lighting:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20000511170940/http://ghg.ecn.pu...
| davidbjaffe wrote:
| When I was in junior high school and high school, I would hang
| out at the Purdue University chess club. He was a regular, prone
| to laughter, a funny guy. We would play double speed chess (which
| we called "p'dorky") and other silliness. I had no idea he went
| on to do the cool things that he did.
| anthk wrote:
| A dual CPU Unix under a Pentium4/Athlon would work as a BBQ too.
|
| Also, a G5 PPC Mac without fans.
| svggrfgovgf wrote:
| Sorry to hear. I remember George running the EE PDP-11 as a time
| share system with Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminals at Purdue while
| the CS department (as part of the school of science) was using
| punch cards! The EE department had a room with 10 or so ADM-3As
| connected to a single PDP-11 that had a few 100KBs of RAM
| (512KB?).
|
| (photos of ADM-3A at
| http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/altair/altair5.htm It has 24 lines
| of 80 characters with green text on black background plus some
| graphics characters which could be used to draw pictures.)
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(page generated 2026-04-02 23:00 UTC)