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George Goble died recently – known for first dual-CPU-Unix and fast BBQ lighting

Posted by finaard |2 hours ago |13 comments

nullbyte808 15 minutes ago[1 more]

"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.""

Amazing. RIP.

finaard 2 hours ago[1 more]

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.

tantalor 2 hours ago[2 more]

Lighting a charcoal grill with liquid oxygen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjPxDOEdsX8

sponaugle 2 hours ago

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.

thesuperbigfrog 39 minutes ago

George's personal home page (seems to be a mirror: https://www.bkinzel.de/misc/ghg/index.html) with the grill lighting video and the TWINKIES experiments (original site gone, but archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20060101093459/http://www.twinki...) were amazing web sites in the late 90s.

runjake 31 minutes ago

SirFatty an hour ago

He was great in "The Birds and the Bees".