Comment by EngineerZ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EngineerZ | Hacker News Reader

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RIP —ghg

I worked for a George as an undergrad too, between Housel and Longshot. Went to many a lunch at Pizza Hut, Pepe’s, and Burger King (“run it through the broiler twice”), usually riding shotgun in the Pontiac Transport.

I didn’t do much on the NP1s for George. By that time Gould had been folded into Encore and development on the NPL architecture had been halted. While the NP1s were still key resources at ECN, a lot of our attention shifted to the Ardent Titan by then, and trying to shake the bugs out of that machine and associated software, including a port of an early version of Matlab.

George was a true renaissance engineer who set an example for me to follow my curiosity and not worry about sticking to a single, narrow field. As a result I’ve had a wonderful career that has included supercomputing, computer networks, land mobile radio, software defined radios, telecommunications, electric power, and rail transportation. Ironically, I have never been all that great of a programmer, but I feel the year or so I worked for George really opened my eyes to what being an engineer could be. I’ve tried to pass that on to the engineers I’ve mentored over the years.

—zawada

That brings back memories! Riding in the Transport to pizza hut with tanks of refrigerant banging around in the back. I remember when Ardent appeared! It was such a cool machine, and to this day I occasionally scan e-bay to see if one comes up.

Indeed what made George special was that he was a broad 'engineer' first, and a specialist later. Everything was an engineering problem that could be solved. Perhaps most of all he believed in the students, hiring as many as he could get approved.

I found a 'bug' in the debugger on the NP1s that gave me a root escalation, and when he found out he said I should come work for him and that was that! About a year in we scrapped another older system and he had a spare disk that we put in the EE NP1 (en.ecn.purdue.edu) and mounted it as '/hogs' because I was always hogging disk space with stuff I downloaded. Funny enough I still have an exabyte tape backup of that drive.

Great times for sure. RIP.

/hogs reminds me of the earlier (mid Eighties) /nightowl and nightowl group. Davie Curry and others were taking up precious disk space on utilities of dubious necessity. One example was dog, a version of cat that displayed the file to screen using curses to randomly paint the letters in the correct location. Students found them, and began hogging too much cpu cycles using them, so George migrated them to /nightowl, and only members of nightowl group could execute.

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