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How to Burn a Magnesium NeXT Cube
Saint Aardvark the Carpeted writes "How do you set a magnesium NeXT cube case on fire? It took this guy two years, *two* cases and the cooperation of Lawrence Livermore Lab's burn cell." A seriously bizarre tale, but worth a read if you're curious. And I have one of those cubes in my office... all sorts of fiendish ideas start.
> A Cube with color, an optical drive, one of the sweetest monitors I had ever seen
The nice monitor was the megapixel (ie: the monochrome one). The color one was ugly (read common).
And the cube was not a color machine. You had to add a NeXTdimension board into it (and boy, that was slow)
That beeing said, NeXT cubes were the most beautifull machines I ever came close, from a hardware and software point of view. I developed 6 years with those. NeXTstep 6 (aka Mac OS X) is crap by comparison (but maybe it will improve)
Cheers,
--fred
On a different note, there used to be a speed week or something up at the Bonneville Salt Flats which would end with a ritual burning of a VW beetle engine block (which is magnesium) and would probably be visible from Mars. Can't find a link tho.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They also mentioned having to buy special equipment for the manufacturing of the cases since you really don't want too much magnesium dust floating around a factory... My father actually helped me buy powdered magnesium and saltpeter when I was a kid - it's a wonder that I still have all of my fingers!
York University bought a truck load of them for financial systems software etc. At one point they even sold them at the University computer store in the late 80s early 90s. I remember watching someone quickly develop a GUI database browsing and query application in about 5 minutes using IB *on the store demo machine*. Compared to the cutting edge technology of Windows and Mac (hypercard was useful I guess) NeXT's were out of this world. The technology excellence and Jobs' megalomania both contributed to NeXT pricing the product out of existence. In those days a single workstation might cost 5-10 times a PC. ... sigh
Later after the York U administration began switching people over to the advanced Windows for Worksgroups 3.11 environment (hehe) they'd show up in Lab in labs here and there - but unless you were like a comp. sci. grad student it was hard to get an account on one.
York never did have a firesale on NeXT boxen while I was there. I heard of people getting cubes (with the monitor) for 100$ at other institutions but I never heard what happened at York U.
Remember this NeXT poster?
"In the 90s, we'll probably see only ten real breakthroughs in computers.
Here are seven of them." The seven:
R/W Optical Disk
The power of Unix (with a GUI)
VLSI chips
Postscript (display and printing)
Digital sound
Multimedia e-mail
Object-oriented/visual development
The NeXT cubes that we used to use were something special. This NeXT poster essentially got it all right, years before its time. Hell we even had a program called zilla.app written by a true code master (Richard Crandall) that allowed us to do distributed computing across platforms (SGI at least). This was back in 1989 or 1990? I think. Wow great machines. I wish I could have purchased one for my own use like the ones in the lab we had back then, but the in our campus bookstore Cubes outfitted like that were something like $10k. But that would get you a completely badass system in all of its black cubeness. Geek coolness was practically sweating out of those things. A Cube with color, an optical drive, one of the sweetest monitors I had ever seen, and best of all a development environment that is still to this day, an amazing workspace.
Unfortunately at $10k a pop NeXT could not afford to keep making machines, but they did focus on the important stuff. (The NeXT OS reborn again as OSX and Webobjects which I wish I had spent more time learning). As the successor to NeXTstep I have great hopes for OSX (If you have not seen the development environment of OSX particularly the GUI developing environment of OSX, it is pretty sweet.) Here we have it folks, potentially the pinacle of UNIXdom. Time will tell.......
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Was there a disclamer in the box with the cube saying there was a flame risk? Sure, the flame is cool and all, but if only one was made of Celulose.
Was the Magnesium anodized? Would that impair its flammibility?
Agreed...Not just art, but vision. The NeXT was a harbinger of things to come (that never did..alas), a bold vision of the future. I remember when there was a NeXT dealer in downtown Toronto. Us developers would go down on a hot, lazy, afternoon and gawk at the absolute beauty and precision of those machines. We were developing on generic 386's, running OS/2 1.3, using Smalltalk. Win95, NT, OS/2, and Linux were blips on the horizon, but there they were..black, powerful, and pure geek lust. They were the most futuristic looking, and most futuristically capable machines out there. They made all the high end offerings (like the RS/6000) look primitive, and made our 386's look just plain pathetic.
Now, everybody has machines 20x or more powerful, minus the grace and elegance (the iMac cube came close, but cutesy can't hold a candle to how the NeXT Cubes looked back then), and we still haven't achieved the panache, both visual and hands-on, that these things achieved.
Fortunately, here in Calgary, there is a certain oil company that still runs NextStep, although it is being phased out. Talking to the developers, to a person they nearly cry lamenting their phasing out.
Truly the passing of a legend. I'm not sure whether to be outraged that the folks in the article burnt one, or to be proud watching a Viking warrior go out in a burning effigy...
Which would the boxes themselves have wanted? I hope the latter...
The cube was painted with a water-soluble paint (not actually black, as it happens: It's a very dark slate gray, so that the logo, which *is* black, stands out.)
As for flammability, it's not an issue. If you read the article, you'll note that it wasn't at all easy to get it lit.
BTW, this article appeared in NeXTWORLD magazine back when these events happend (early '90's).
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
One of the engineers at CodeFab picked up 130 NeXT systems in a bid to get our attention and have us hire him. It worked (CodeFab was founded by and has hired a number of old hand NeXT community folk).
We gave most of the machines to the free hardware foundation (it was a long time ago and I can't even remember who or give a link. Doh! If you are really interested in tracking this down ping me and I'll figure it out.).
In any case, out of the 130, I kept one configuration for myself... a dream machine. It is a Turbo Cube with 3 NeXTdimension boards connected to 3 21" NeXT monitors. It is frighteningly large but very cool. Works seamlessly.
My next experiment is to try hooking up the various bits of NTSC video in/outs together and see if I can't cause some nice feedback loops or something.