[TUHS] George Goble (Purdue University)

[Ron Natalie via TUHS]

We built a couple of the Purdue Duals at BRL.    Pull the terminator out 
of the SBI bus and put another CPU there.   You just ordered another CPU 
card cage and boards from DEC.
The tricky part is that you needed to hack the interconnect cables to 
flip the signals around since you were using the wrong end of the bus.

The 780 also had a Unibus on it.   George to accomplish some testing, 
put a PDP-11 on the far end of the UNIBUS as well.   This resulted in a 
system with no bus terminators in it at all.

In addition to his fun and games with liquid oxygen, he developed an 
ozone-friendly refrigerant.   https://www.yarchive.net/ac/r406a.html

We moved on from the DualVax to two processor Gould SEL systems which 
George and friends did the same OS hacks that he did for the dual vax.
Of course, someone at Berkeley decided it would be cute to put a 0 at 
location 0 in the 4BSD address space.    This led to a whole slew of 
undetected undefiend behavior.
The Gould UNIX just unmapped page zero causing a hard trap if you did 
that.   Unfortunately, there was some software we didn’t have source for 
(notably Oracle) that relied on *0 = 0, so one of the Purdue guys put a 
hack in the OS that if they saw a certain value in the a.out header it 
would enable “Breain-dead VAX compatilibity mode” and map a zero at 
zero.   We just had to poke the affected binaries to turn it on.

-Ron