George Goble has died | Hacker News Reader

George Goble has died

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Goble

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.

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.

Any chance all of that will be sent to the Internet Archive or Archive Team?

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...

> 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…"

I think this may be the vid https://youtu.be/UjPxDOEdsX8 ?

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.

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...

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.)

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".

Lighting a charcoal grill with liquid oxygen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjPxDOEdsX8

I was holding the camera for some of these videos. Such a great time!

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.

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.

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)

Arthur Clarke's “Report on Planet Three” touches on this.

"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.

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...

Thank you!

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

/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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

For you youngsters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Goble

Remarkable to combine early Unix contributions and inventing new refrigerants in a single career.

Here is the Dave Barry column mentioned in the obituary about George’s barbecue lighting: https://www.davebarry.com/misccol/charcoal.htm

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")

>stacks of exabyte drives

Exabyte® the brand of multi gigabyte removables, not drives of a million terabyte capacity.

Oh, so sad to read. Everyone knew him when I was at Purdue. A rare mind. RIP, ghg.

A dual CPU Unix under a Pentium4/Athlon would work as a BBQ too.

Also, a G5 PPC Mac without fans.

RIP

He was great in "The Birds and the Bees".

Wrong George Goble - this is the computer scientist not the actor.

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