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George Goble has died

George Goble has died

finaard

Comments (18)

  • svggrfgovgf
    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.)
  • finaard
    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.
  • nullbyte808
    "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.
  • tantalor
    Lighting a charcoal grill with liquid oxygen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjPxDOEdsX8
  • sponaugle
    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.
  • runjake
  • thesuperbigfrog
    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.
  • davidbjaffe
    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
    A dual CPU Unix under a Pentium4/Athlon would work as a BBQ too.Also, a G5 PPC Mac without fans.
  • SirFatty
    He was great in "The Birds and the Bees".