alt Hacker NewsHe smashed together two VAX 11/780's that were million dollar(?) machines at the time, to make the world's first dual processor VAX. Ok not literally "smashed", but he did some astounding hack involving putting the cpu cabinets adjacent and connecting the MASSBUS backplanes together or something like that. I'm not a hardware guy but the sheer brass of that operation amazed me. DEC later did their own version which they sold as the 11/782.
I see now, this is described in the Wikipedia article as well.
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"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.
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.