George H. Goble

Who is George H. Goble?

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

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