[TUHS] George Goble (Purdue University)

[Ken Thompson via TUHS]

oh, so sad. i loved ghg, smart and fun. rip.


On Mon, Mar 23, 2026 at 6:57 AM Rich Kulawiec via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> 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.
>