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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.
Then you're blind.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
At this VAR I used to work for, we took care of the Apple IIs that a school district abruptly decided to obsolete. We had a pallat with 15 or so of these things that were going to the dumpster. Did we simply unceremoniously chuck them in the dumpster? Of course not! It was time to play Apple II Toss. You see, if you put just the right amount of force and arc on an Apple II tossed underhand it will come down with all the force on it's lower right corner. This sprays slices of Apple everywhere! Just about every keycap flies off and the housing disintegrates into several large scattering pieces. The electronics pretty much look like what was left in the Fax Smashing scene in Offficespace. Okay, so we had to get a pushbroom when we were done and our female manager was exasperated with us. It was WAAAAY more fun then leaving them intact for the dumpster divers.
I was pleased to see that the author of this little adventure was none other than Simson Garfinkel. Garfinkel is an excellent author who, among other things, co-wrote Practical Unix & Internet Security with Spaf. So this little missive suddenly gave me a whole new perspective on the term firewall. . .
-"Zow"
Ahh, those were happier times.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Can you get the two OSs to speak NetInfo to each other?
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
What I wouldn't give to have Mike Judge read that account in his "Beavis" voice! And get all excited when talking about the burn, the BURN!
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
from the article...
"The paint started bubbling, then burned away, leaving the black
anodized magnesium alloy. ("It's an alloy that is resistent to burning,"
the voice of the soon-to-be-ex-NeXT-employee came back to me.)"
//ct
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
as the guy stated.. he's a chemist. and about 80% of all chemists are pyromaniacs. hell.. I should know, I used to be one (a chemist that is.. I'll always be a pyromaniac.. :)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
The only NeXT I ever saw running in person was at York U in some back room lab. My friend was developing a bunch of programs in HyperCard on the Macs and used the TurboColor as a CD player! Bloody gorgeous machine.
My biggest claim to geek fame these days is running OpenStep 4.2 in VirtualPC under OS X. :)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
At least most of the page is available for perusing on the Google cache:
s imson.net/photos/hacks/cubefire.html+site:simson.n et+next&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:oudSX-rG5cA:
d00de
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!
And I've got karma to burn baby so here goes!
How about a Beowulf Cluster of those. You could light up a city block!
-1 Troll, I await you!
____________________________________
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
There is no need to mark it as being a flame risk. The possiblity that it would catch on fire is nil. Bulk magnesium is very hard to burn because it is a very good heat conductor. If you have a lot of magnesium, it is very difficult to ignite, because it conducts heat away. and you can never get any part of it hot enough to ignite.
If you have a small piece (Like a strip that they use for chemistry demos), there is nowhere for the heat to go, so you can heat it up to the ignition point much easier.
Why do you think they had to go to Lawrence Livermore National Lab? It is not easy to generate that much heat safely.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
How the hell is that a troll? So anyone who can appreciate a beautiful machine, and doesn't react positively to hearing about how a real life Beavis thinks its cool to burn one, is trolling?
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.
1 - Set NeXT Cube up as a server
2 - Post Story link on /.
3 - Pictures tomorrow...
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
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.
I read this article in a magazine. Or something almost exactly like it. Several of the sentences seem word-for-word. But yeah. It *did* run right when Next discontinued the cube though. So it couldn't have taken him too long to do this.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
How considerate!
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?
In any case, it was intended to represent NeXT setting the technology world on fire.
Originally they were going to just burn the blank, but well... READ THE ARTICLE, it's interesting in a "i'm stoned off my ass" sort of way.
...what were the other three?
Breakfast served all day!
You wouldn't burn down Abe Lincoln's cabin would you?
Dunno. Is that made of magnesium too?
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
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...
Umm... actually, they do still exist. They just got purchased by Apple. NeXTStep/OpenStep is the foundation for Mac OS X. And I swear that the NeXT cube was the inspiration for the Mac cube, but I can't back it up. So... NeXT is now Apple.
Ok. This is going to come off sounding a little harsh, but here it goes anyway:
You've never used a NeXT, have you ? You really dont have a fucking clue what you're talking about, do you ?
1) you didn't read the article (typical)
2) NeXT machines didn't use X-windows, they used something completely NeXT proprietary. The server process that managed the GUi was called "WindowServer". THe whole GUI was based on DPS. There _were_ Xservers for NeXT, but most were commercial.
3) what does "fully bsd style" mean ? I bet you couldn't come up with a definition for that that made any sense, but even if you could, it wouldn't be NeXTSTEP or OpenSTEP.
3a) NS used funky non-unix stuff, like NetInfo (sort of like NIS, but NeXT specific (although ports to other OSes were made))
3b) NS was not very posix compliant.. there were basic posix things missing from NS
3c) Many things in NS/OS were GNU software.. they had no issues about throwing away GPL software and replacing it with GNU as necessary.. hardly a very BSDish thing to do ? A notable example is the system compiler - gcc/objc. Other examples include the use of gnutar in many popular next packages (although I suppose this isn't a NeXT decision so much as a user community one)
4) "handle scsi devices in unix"
Uh.. wtf are you talking about ? On real hardware, SCSI is utterly brainless anyway. But its especailly so on NeXTs.. you just plug in a device and the GUI pops up a box saying "new disk, blow it away or mount it ?" Whats to configure ? Theres none of this sd0a bullshit, NS just figures it out..
so, for what its worth, i agree, NeXT boxes are cool and its too bad they were burning them.. 7+ YEARS AGO. And while everyone is entitled to an opinion, your post is like >50% erroneous as far as your "facts", and then you use these "Facts" to apparently justify ranting about something that never happened.
Nice post, pal.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I know NeXT boxen are relics from the past, for all intensive purposes, useless. However, they are antiques from a company that no longer exists. They were, in reality, a milestone in computing technology. Superior to everything else around them, NeXT boxes a testiment to innovation (unlike most of what we see today).
There's a finite number of this machines left in the world, and it's a shame to see such a silly waste. Instead of burning these classic machines, try donating them to people who appreciate them. You wouldn't burn down Abe Lincoln's cabin would you?
Why bother.
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."
It's been done in MegaTokyo.
Shouldn't it be possible to use and AMD Athlon to do the same thing to PC? Now that would be entertainment!! :-)
OT: The r and n in 'Burn' merge together on my Mac/iCab and I get the subject 'How to Bum a Magnesium NeXT Cube'...
They didnt just grab a cube yesterday and set it on fiere, the burning was done right after next cubes were discontinued, and the cubes were provided by next. In the future, think, wait, and then speak.
Information wants to be free, hardware wants to be immolated?
Oh well, at least I get to use the word "anthropomorphism" in a post.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
"This is so NeXT," I told Sally. "Everything works great in the tests, then when you try to make it work for real, in the field, nothing works. They build a computer out of magnesium, and it doesn't even burn!"
:))
I laughed pretty hard on that one
http://overtone.org/sass/cubefire.html is a mirror, if you're finding the main site to be slashdotted.
This is kind of old news, even for Slashdot. Simson Garfinkel (who has been mentioned on this site before) burnt these things in March of 1993.
In '93, these things weren't collectors items -- they were neat-o cool, but still falling in value. By '96, you could probably walk into any math department at any university in the world and buy a Cube with a burned out optical drive, a bad hard drive, a faded out black and white monitor, and a broken PostScript printer, all for well under $500. Hell, at some universities you probably still can.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The Day The NeXT Cube Died...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Livermore needed the names, social security numbers, and addresses of everybody who would be inolved with the project.
An all these years my mother used to take unfocused pictures of us kids using one of those compact cameras with "126" film cartridges, and disposable magnesium flash cubes. The guy should've said he was going to ignite a bunch of flash cubes, and save himself some hassle.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
The NeXT cube is ART. The circuit boards are wired in an arrangement so perfect it's beautiful technology art.
God, I sound like Steve Jobs.
I can think of better things to burn that cost >$6000US. Seen how much they go for on EBay?