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George Goble has died

94 points

by finaard

5 hours ago

| past

| 10 comments

| legacy.com

| HN

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

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svggrfgovgf

2 hours ago

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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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finaard

5 hours ago

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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.

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sponaugle

4 hours ago

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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.

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throwup238

4 hours ago

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

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tantalor

5 hours ago

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

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sponaugle

5 hours ago

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

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gorgoiler

4 hours ago

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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.

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dekhn

4 hours ago

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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)

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nullbyte808

3 hours ago

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"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.

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finaard

3 hours ago

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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...

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sponaugle

5 hours ago

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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.

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housel

1 hour ago

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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.

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runjake

4 hours ago

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

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thesuperbigfrog

4 hours ago

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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.

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davidbjaffe

3 hours ago

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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.

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anthk

2 hours ago

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

Also, a G5 PPC Mac without fans.

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SirFatty

5 hours ago

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

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svggrfgovgf

1 hour ago

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