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•Apr 2, 2026
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•Apr 2, 2026
Any chance all of that will be sent to the Internet Archive or Archive Team?
ForOldHack•Apr 3, 2026
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."
I was holding the camera for some of these videos. Such a great time!
ForOldHack•Apr 3, 2026
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•Apr 2, 2026
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.
(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•Apr 3, 2026
Arthur Clarke's “Report on Planet Three” touches on this.
sponaugle•Apr 2, 2026
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•Apr 2, 2026
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•Apr 3, 2026
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•Apr 3, 2026
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
SirFatty•Apr 2, 2026
He was great in "The Birds and the Bees".
svggrfgovgf•Apr 2, 2026
Wrong George Goble - this is the computer scientist not the actor.
Remarkable to combine early Unix contributions and inventing new refrigerants in a single career.
nullbyte808•Apr 2, 2026
"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.""
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•Apr 2, 2026
A dual CPU Unix under a Pentium4/Athlon would work as a BBQ too.
Also, a G5 PPC Mac without fans.
svggrfgovgf•Apr 2, 2026
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.)
dublin•Apr 3, 2026
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.
tartoran•Apr 3, 2026
RIP
throwaway81523•Apr 3, 2026
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•Apr 3, 2026
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•Apr 3, 2026
"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.
13 Comments
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.
"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...
Well, now I know what we should be pouring if anyone plans to use the expression "pour one out for…"
I am glad to have been 100s of miles away.
Thank you for your work, and of corse for the many many laughs.
Almost everyone and everything around us of any importance is one mishap away from going disappearing in a hot, sooty flame.
(it's a great book in general, but the bit about our use of a volatile gas for a living environment is pretty neat)
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
Amazing. RIP.
That's the page mostly dedicated to BBQ lighting: https://web.archive.org/web/20000511170940/http://ghg.ecn.pu...
Also, a G5 PPC Mac without fans.
(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.)
George was a really interesting guy, a true hacker's hacker, and I truly enjoyed talking with him.
I see now, this is described in the Wikipedia article as well.
"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.