alt Hacker NewsThat is awesome. The NP-1s were great. I spent lots of time working on en.ecn.purdue.edu - Some tape drivers, some maintenance, and lots of software projects - it was really cool that in those days everyone was on the same machine, working from terminals. Good times!
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