George Goble (Purdue University)

[ Apologies if you've already seen this elsewhere. ]

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.

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.


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