[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 : 168 points
Date : 2026-04-02 18:21 UTC (1 days 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?
| ForOldHack wrote:
| One of the first videos you downloaded... Well, from the other
| end, when it went 'Viral' it maxxed out the OC line that Perdue
| had, for a week. completely. I saw it once, a year later... and
| of course... found it hysterically funny, and shared it with my
| students... "Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long
| wooden handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in
| stores) onto a grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit
| cigarette for ignition. What follows is the most impressive
| charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, featuring a large fireball
| that, according to Goble, reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
| The charcoal was ready for cooking in - this has to be a world
| record - 3 seconds."
|
| "Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American,
| all choked up with gratitude at the fact that I do not live
| anywhere near the engineers' picnic site."
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120416173854/http://baetzler.d...
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _he probably is best known for lighting a BBQ in under 5
| seconds by use of liquid oxygen_
|
| Well, now I know what we should be pouring if anyone plans to
| use the expression "pour one out for..."
| tim333 wrote:
| I think this may be the vid https://youtu.be/UjPxDOEdsX8 ?
| 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!
| ForOldHack wrote:
| GOOD GOD! you know that 1 oz of LoX + 1 charcoal briquette =
| 1 stick of dynomite. I am so glad that only grills were hurt,
| and a few camera lenses as the sky went dark on the video,
| because the light was SO BRIGHT.
|
| I am glad to have been 100s of miles away.
|
| Thank you for your work, and of corse for the many many
| laughs.
| 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)
| mjd wrote:
| Arthur Clarke's "Report on Planet Three" touches on this.
| 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.
| sponaugle wrote:
| That is awesome. The NP-1s were great. I spent lots of time
| working on en.ecn.purdue.edu - Some tape drivers, some
| maintenance, and lots of software projects - it was really
| cool that in those days everyone was on the same machine,
| working from terminals. Good times!
| EngineerZ wrote:
| RIP --ghg
|
| I worked for a George as an undergrad too, between Housel
| and Longshot. Went to many a lunch at Pizza Hut, Pepe's,
| and Burger King ("run it through the broiler twice"),
| usually riding shotgun in the Pontiac Transport.
|
| I didn't do much on the NP1s for George. By that time Gould
| had been folded into Encore and development on the NPL
| architecture had been halted. While the NP1s were still key
| resources at ECN, a lot of our attention shifted to the
| Ardent Titan by then, and trying to shake the bugs out of
| that machine and associated software, including a port of
| an early version of Matlab.
|
| George was a true renaissance engineer who set an example
| for me to follow my curiosity and not worry about sticking
| to a single, narrow field. As a result I've had a wonderful
| career that has included supercomputing, computer networks,
| land mobile radio, software defined radios,
| telecommunications, electric power, and rail
| transportation. Ironically, I have never been all that
| great of a programmer, but I feel the year or so I worked
| for George really opened my eyes to what being an engineer
| could be. I've tried to pass that on to the engineers I've
| mentored over the years.
|
| --zawada
| sponaugle wrote:
| That brings back memories! Riding in the Transport to
| pizza hut with tanks of refrigerant banging around in the
| back. I remember when Ardent appeared! It was such a cool
| machine, and to this day I occasionally scan e-bay to see
| if one comes up.
|
| Indeed what made George special was that he was a broad
| 'engineer' first, and a specialist later. Everything was
| an engineering problem that could be solved. Perhaps most
| of all he believed in the students, hiring as many as he
| could get approved.
|
| I found a 'bug' in the debugger on the NP1s that gave me
| a root escalation, and when he found out he said I should
| come work for him and that was that! About a year in we
| scrapped another older system and he had a spare disk
| that we put in the EE NP1 (en.ecn.purdue.edu) and mounted
| it as '/hogs' because I was always hogging disk space
| with stuff I downloaded. Funny enough I still have an
| exabyte tape backup of that drive.
|
| Great times for sure. RIP.
| criticas wrote:
| /hogs reminds me of the earlier (mid Eighties) /nightowl
| and nightowl group. Davie Curry and others were taking up
| precious disk space on utilities of dubious necessity.
| One example was dog, a version of cat that displayed the
| file to screen using curses to randomly paint the letters
| in the correct location. Students found them, and began
| hogging too much cpu cycles using them, so George
| migrated them to /nightowl, and only members of nightowl
| group could execute.
| 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
| jimbokun wrote:
| Remarkable to combine early Unix contributions and inventing
| new refrigerants in a single career.
| 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...
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Thank you!
| 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.)
| criticas wrote:
| Sounds like I met George only a little later - Fall 1980. By
| then, EE's had two Vaxes to abuse - EE and ED. The ADMs were
| supplemented with ADDS Regent-20s. Students had strong opinions
| about which was better. LSi purists looked down on the
| "Reject-20s".
| dublin wrote:
| I contacted him a number of years ago about his R-12 replacement
| for my old 1975 Ferrari, rather than converting it. It worked
| perfectly - _better_ than Freon-12, even. Which is the only
| reason the EPA refused to allow it to be widely used. His web
| site (ghgcool, IIRC, I 'm sure long gone by now) taught me that
| you can also mix butane and isopropane as a superior drop-in
| substitute for R-12, but he didn't pursue that approach because
| he knew that the EPA would kill it on safety grounds - even
| though it was only slightly more flammable than R-12 with the
| required compressor oil mixed into it.
|
| George was a really interesting guy, a true hacker's hacker, and
| I truly enjoyed talking with him.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| There is no grand conspiracy. Every major gaseous hydrocarbon
| also tend to usable as refrigerants but tend to be extremely
| flammable, while most every chlorofluorocarbon tends to
| inflammable but extremely toxic under deflagration forming
| nerve agents like phosgene and acid vapors like HF and HCl.
| Thus, the primary tradeoffs are cost, flammability safety,
| deflagration safety, ozone destruction potential, and global
| warming potential.
|
| The problems of conversion include in/compatibly of lubricants
| and refrigerants with seals and the density, boiling points,
| and latent heat of vaporization of replacements. The R-12 to
| R-134a conversion process was simpler but typically included
| different lubricants, orifice, and o-ring seal materials. I
| don't see how R-12 to a hydrocarbon or admixture of R-290/600a
| isn't a magical tall tale without proper math, equipment, and
| understanding of HVAC operating principles.
|
| See this PDF for a summary:
| https://www.colmaccoil.com/media/394090/refrigerant-guide-fi...
| tartoran wrote:
| RIP
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| He smashed together two VAX 11/780's that were million dollar(?)
| machines at the time, to make the world's first dual processor
| VAX. Ok not literally "smashed", but he did some astounding hack
| involving putting the cpu cabinets adjacent and connecting the
| MASSBUS backplanes together or something like that. I'm not a
| hardware guy but the sheer brass of that operation amazed me. DEC
| later did their own version which they sold as the 11/782.
|
| I see now, this is described in the Wikipedia article as well.
| EngineerZ wrote:
| The story he would tell of getting a second-hand VAX 11/780 CPU
| cabinet that got damaged when it "fell off a of a truck"
| somewhere in Michigan was legendary. Parts from that machine
| became part of one of the early dual CPU VAXes, though I think
| many of the second CPUs were purchased as parts kits, IIRC.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| "In 1981, he wired together the backplanes of two DEC
| VAX-11/780 systems and made the first multi-CPU Unix computer,
| preceding DEC's dual processor VAX-11/782"
|
| "This model is essentially a copy of the "dual VAX-11/780"
| computers hand built by wire-wrapping the backplanes of two
| VAX-11/780 CPUs by then graduate student George H. Goble and
| undergraduate assistants at Purdue University as part of his
| work on his master's degree thesis on modifications of the Unix
| kernel for multi-CPU architecture."
|
| Yes, he was the first. DEC had made a bunch of attempts, he got
| it to work, and DEC came running.
|
| G. H. Goble and M. H. Marsh, "A Dual Processor VAX 11/780,"
| Purdue University Technical Report, TR-EE 81-31, September
| 1981.
| tosti wrote:
| I had to look up the song mentioned in the wikipedia article.
| Here it is:
|
| https://mdfs.net/Docs/Humour/Computing/Songs/B/BlowOut
|
| (Sung to the tune of "London Bridge is Falling Down")
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Here is the Dave Barry column mentioned in the obituary about
| George's barbecue lighting:
| https://www.davebarry.com/misccol/charcoal.htm
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _stacks of exabyte drives_
|
| Exabyte(r) the brand of multi gigabyte removables, not drives of
| a million terabyte capacity.
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