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.
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."
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.
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.
"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.
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.)
Sounds like I met George only a little later - Fall 1980. By then, EE's had two Vaxes to abuse - EE and ED. The ADMs were supplemented with ADDS Regent-20s. Students had strong opinions about which was better. LSi purists looked down on the "Reject-20s".
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.
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.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] threadHe 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…"
Amazing. RIP.
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.
https://mdfs.net/Docs/Humour/Computing/Songs/B/BlowOut
(Sung to the tune of "London Bridge is Falling Down")
Exabyte® the brand of multi gigabyte removables, not drives of a million terabyte capacity.