George H. Goble - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

This article is about the computer engineer. For the late actor and comedian (1919-1991), whose name was spelled differently, see George Gobel
George Gobel
George Leslie Gobel was an American comedian and actor. He was best known as the star of his own weekly NBC television show, The George Gobel Show, which ran from 1954 to 1960 .-Early years:He was born George Leslie Goebel in Chicago, Illinois, His father, Hermann Goebel, was a...

.

George H. Goble is a staff member at the Purdue University Engineering Computer Network and a 1996 Ig Nobel Prize

Ig Nobel Prize

The Ig Nobel Prizes are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The stated aim of the prizes is to "first make people laugh, and then make them think"...

winner.

Goble is commonly known as "ghg" since he has used that as a login id, and signature in digital communications, since the 1970s. He received his BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering

Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...

at Purdue University

Purdue University

Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...

.

In 1981, he wired together the backplane

Backplane

A backplane is a group of connectors connected in parallel with each other, so that each pin of each connector is linked to the same relative pin of all the other connectors forming a computer bus. It is used as a backbone to connect several printed circuit boards together to make up a complete...

s of two DEC

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

VAX-11

The VAX-11 was a family of minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture . The VAX-11/780 was the first VAX computer.- VAX-11/780 :...

/780's and made the first multi-CPU Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

computer, preceding DEC's dual processor VAX-11

VAX-11

/782. The operating system was based on the 4.2 BSD kernel, and the modifications thus made eventually made it into the 4.3 BSD Unix release. At the beginning of the 4.3 BSD user manuals, Bill Joy

Bill Joy

William Nelson Joy , commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003...

wrote a special note of thanks to GHG for being courageous enough to put the multi-CPU kernel into a production environment before anyone else did. (However, the frequent crashes for a while inspired the writing of many humorous text files by the Purdue University Electrical Engineering

Electrical engineering

student body, such as "The VAX had a Blowout", to be sung to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down

London Bridge is Falling Down

"London Bridge Is Falling Down" is a well-known traditional nursery rhyme and singing game, which is found in different versions all over the world. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 502.-Lyrics:...

). The development of the Dual-CPU Unix system was the subject of Goble's Master's thesis.

Around this time, Goble also developed a networking protocol for Unix, referred to as pnet, which was used at Purdue at the time before being displaced by TCP/IP. Pnet allowed remote logins, and remote execution of commands, among other capabilities.

In the late 1980s, Goble started experimenting with refrigerants, due to increased danger and lower thermodynamic efficiency of the recently introduced R-134a compared to the older R-12

Dichlorodifluoromethane

Dichlorodifluoromethane , is a colorless gas, and usually sold under the brand name Freon-12, is a chlorofluorocarbon halomethane , used as a refrigerant and aerosol spray propellant. Complying with the Montreal Protocol, its manufacture was banned in the United States along with many other...

which was being phased out due to concerns about damage to the ozone layer, and the incompatibility of R-134a with the lubricating oil and other materials used in systems built for R-12. In 1987, he converted the beverage refrigerators in the HKN lounge in the basement of the Purdue Electrical Engineering building to using a refrigerant of his own devising. This refrigerant is now recognized as R-406A

R-406A

R-406A is a refrigerant invented by George H Goble. It is a mixture of three components chlorodifluoromethane , isobutane and chlorodifluoroethane in the ratio 55/4/41....

by ASHRAE and is available commercially under the trade name AutoFrost. He later developed another refrigerant which is compatible with R134A lubricants, but which is superior in thermodynamic efficiency and lower system internal pressures called GHG-X8.

In 1996, Goble was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for preparing a barbecue for cooking in less than 5 seconds by the use of a smoldering cigarette

Cigarette

A cigarette is a small roll of finely cut tobacco leaves wrapped in a cylinder of thin paper for smoking. The cigarette is ignited at one end and allowed to smoulder; its smoke is inhaled from the other end, which is held in or to the mouth and in some cases a cigarette holder may be used as well...

, charcoal and LOX (liquid oxygen

Liquid oxygen

Liquid oxygen — abbreviated LOx, LOX or Lox in the aerospace, submarine and gas industries — is one of the physical forms of elemental oxygen.-Physical properties:...

). This act attracted the attention of the West Lafayette, Indiana

West Lafayette, Indiana

As of the census of 2010, there were 29,596 people, 12,591 households, and 3,588 families residing in the city. The population density was 5,381.1 people per square mile . The racial makeup of the city was 74.3% White, 17.3% Asian, 2.7% African American, 0.16% Native American, 0.03% Pacific...

fire department, which warned him to never let them catch him in the possession of LOX near a barbecue fire ever again.

Goble is also noted for driving a vehicle with the Indiana

Indiana

Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...

license plate UNIX, and now also GHG-1.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.