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How to Burn a Magnesium NeXT Cube

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the to-much-spare-time dept.

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.

4 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Here's how it's done by the_other_one · · Score: 5, Funny

    1 - Set NeXT Cube up as a server

    2 - Post Story link on /.

    3 - Pictures tomorrow...

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    134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
  2. NeXT boxes by BWJones · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.......

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  3. Re:Kind of Cool, But Kind of Stupid by sracer9 · · Score: 5, Funny

    You wouldn't burn down Abe Lincoln's cabin would you?


    Dunno. Is that made of magnesium too?

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    No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
  4. mirror by mosch · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://overtone.org/sass/cubefire.html is a mirror, if you're finding the main site to be slashdotted.