George Goble has died (opens in new tab)

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."

https://web.archive.org/web/20120416173854/http://baetzler.d...

George was really into video stuff - he had stacks of 8mm video tapes in his office, and of course stacks of exabyte drives. He had many different cameras and was always trying new ones out. He was also a really early adopter of laserdiscs, and I have a few discs he gave me when I graduated.

> he probably is best known for lighting a BBQ in under 5 seconds by use of liquid oxygen

Well, now I know what we should be pouring if anyone plans to use the expression "pour one out for…"

I think this may be the vid https://youtu.be/UjPxDOEdsX8 ?

I was holding the camera for some of these videos. Such a great time!

It reminds me of a comment I once read about how alien visitors, upon arriving on Earth, would be appalled to see how we live our lives at the bottom of a giant gaseous ocean of 20% oxygen.

Almost everyone and everything around us of any importance is one mishap away from going disappearing in a hot, sooty flame.

The archived copy of his old website has a picture from the beach: https://web.archive.org/web/20000511210957/http://ghg.ecn.pu...

That's the page mostly dedicated to BBQ lighting: https://web.archive.org/web/20000511170940/http://ghg.ecn.pu...

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.

The story he would tell of getting a second-hand VAX 11/780 CPU cabinet that got damaged when it “fell off a of a truck” somewhere in Michigan was legendary. Parts from that machine became part of one of the early dual CPU VAXes, though I think many of the second CPUs were purchased as parts kits, IIRC.

"In 1981, he wired together the backplanes of two DEC VAX-11/780 systems and made the first multi-CPU Unix computer, preceding DEC's dual processor VAX-11/782"

"This model is essentially a copy of the "dual VAX-11/780" computers hand built by wire-wrapping the backplanes of two VAX-11/780 CPUs by then graduate student George H. Goble and undergraduate assistants at Purdue University as part of his work on his master's degree thesis on modifications of the Unix kernel for multi-CPU architecture."

Yes, he was the first. DEC had made a bunch of attempts, he got it to work, and DEC came running.

G. H. Goble and M. H. Marsh, "A Dual Processor VAX 11/780," Purdue University Technical Report, TR-EE 81-31, September 1981.

There is no grand conspiracy. Every major gaseous hydrocarbon also tend to usable as refrigerants but tend to be extremely flammable, while most every chlorofluorocarbon tends to inflammable but extremely toxic under deflagration forming nerve agents like phosgene and acid vapors like HF and HCl. Thus, the primary tradeoffs are cost, flammability safety, deflagration safety, ozone destruction potential, and global warming potential.

The problems of conversion include in/compatibly of lubricants and refrigerants with seals and the density, boiling points, and latent heat of vaporization of replacements. The R-12 to R-134a conversion process was simpler but typically included different lubricants, orifice, and o-ring seal materials. I don't see how R-12 to a hydrocarbon or admixture of R-290/600a isn't a magical tall tale without proper math, equipment, and understanding of HVAC operating principles.

See this PDF for a summary: https://www.colmaccoil.com/media/394090/refrigerant-guide-fi...

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".

Remarkable to combine early Unix contributions and inventing new refrigerants in a single career.

Wrong George Goble - this is the computer scientist not the actor.