[TUHS] George Goble (Purdue University)

[Rich Kulawiec via TUHS]

We lost George on March 18, 2026.  Much of the world only knows him
for his experiments with rapid (*extremely* rapid) BBQ grill ignition,
and those were impressive [1]; but the work that he did at the Purdue
Engineering Computer Network was much more germane to this mailing list.
George and Mike Marsh came up with the "Purdual" 2-CPU VAX, which
was the first multiprocessor Unix system; and along with other folks
in EE department, he built one of the first Unix networks.  He did
all kinds of work with DEC and Sun and UCBerkeley and everyone who was
anyone in the Unix world...and I once watched him casually twiddling
bits in kernel memory space with adb on a running multiuser system.

He did not make a mistake.  Of course not.

Of much less note but of great personal importance to me, he picked
my login name -- although it wasn't his first choice.  He assigned my
last name early one morning and by mid-afternoon had become so frustrated
trying to spell it correctly that he changed it to this one -- and it's
stuck for 45+ years.  I won't ever change it: if it was good enough
for Ghg, as we all knew him, it's good enough for me.

George was an incredibly smart guy who could have easily gone somewhere
else and made a fortune, but he stayed at Purdue...and as a result,
tens of thousands of students and faculty and staff benefitted from
his work.  "Brilliant" and "dedicated" are sometimes overused words;
but not this time.

---rsk

[1] I was present for some of those, as George escalated from hair
dryers to liquid oxygen, and recalled that there were scientists
at Los Alamos who were concerned that a nuclear detonation might
ignite the atmosphere.  After watching a $15 K-Mart grill be
more-or-less vaporized, I began to understand their trepidation.