Burning a NeXTCube (1993)

https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html

by _Microft • 3 years ago

200 70 3 years ago

bertrandom• 3 years ago

This may be a better link: https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html as it has links to the actual photos on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nitroba/albums/721575944354804...

dang3• 3 years ago

Changed now (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34586795). Thanks!

aardvark179• 3 years ago

We tried burning a small part of a Tadpole Sparcbook case (which was also a magnesium alloy) and it was hard work. I think we had to file the surface down to remove the surface oxide and then attack it with a blowtorch.

tpmx• 3 years ago

Besides missing the quality of writing in some of the better 80/early 90s computer mags (mostly familiar with US/UK), I also really miss the amount of money/skill/love they spent on getting high class photography and/or illustrations for the cover and key articles.

This (1993) was on the tail end of that phenomenon.

jjtheblunt• 3 years ago

i loved NeXTworld Magazine (not sure i got the lowercase and uppercase letters right)

sammalloy2• 3 years ago

It sounds like the OP was describing Mondo 2000.

Gordonjcp• 3 years ago

Given that magnesium alloy car wheels often survive car fires with barely more than the surface spalling off, I don't know what they expected.

low_tech_love4• 3 years ago

Living in Europe, I’m deeply amazed at how much help and support he got for free from a bunch of people from one of the most important (and expensive) laboratories in the world. All of that just to basically have some fun and take some pictures. I’m absolutely sure that here he would never have any support to do this. We unfortunately have forgotten how to have fun and be creative here in the old world.

anyfoo3• 3 years ago

As someone who's been living in the US for a while, but who grew up, lived, and worked in Germany all my life before, I'm not sure what you mean.

Me and engineers I knew were humans who liked fun (and especially had curiosity), too. As long as proper safety precautions are taken, why not? Seems like it wasn't very different here, either:

"I need to have an MDS --- a Material Date Safety Shet --- on the paint before I can let you burn it," he said.

cjbgkagh• 3 years ago

The US is surprisingly Germanic so it could be a common cultural thread.

low_tech_love4• 3 years ago

Sure but would you expect Fraunhofer (or something like that) to just give away resources and human hours to just burn a computer case? Of course Europeans have fun, that was just hyperbole; but institutionally speaking, it’s an extremely rigid place. You might even question whether it was ok to spend those resources. Maybe it wasn’t. But every time I go to the USA I’m positively impressed by how much they have the freedom to make decisions. In Europe all we do is follow the rules.

csdvrx• 3 years ago

This connects to a comment I made earlier today about pleasure or fun not being things that are valued much in Europe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34581385

reaperducer• 3 years ago

I’m deeply amazed at how much help and support he got for free from a bunch of people from one of the most important (and expensive) laboratories in the world

As a former journalist, it truly is amazing the amount of free information that comes out of America's government, and the vast number of truly helpful people who work there.

I can't count the number of times I didn't understand something I read in a federal document, and was able to pick up the phone and within 15 minutes or so be in touch either with the person who wrote it, or someone who knew the topic intimately. Very often, they would follow-up with stacks of documentation by mail.

And I'm not talking about conversing with public relations people or media people or others who are paid to talk to the media. But regular federal staffers who really just wanted to make sure I understood things.

The Congressional Budget Office, and the General Services Administration stick in my memory as being especially helpful.

Sadly, it's the bad bureaucrats who get all the notoriety, and state/local offices have become markedly worse over recent years, as budgets have been cut and the Freedom of Information Act backfired, turning everything into a firewalled process. But there are still plenty of people out there who remember that every... single... thing... the federal government produces is the property of the people, which is why it's illegal for a federal agency to assert copyright over anything it created with tax dollars.

Again, state and local governments routinely put © notices on everything, as if they weren't paid for with public money for the good of the public.

low_tech_love4• 3 years ago

Exactly. The amazing thing about America is how these people just pop up spontaneously. They get a salary just like we do but for some reason some (many?) of them just have this spark to go further. I love that you mentioned actually talking to people to solve problems. In the Nordic countries it feels like every minute of every person is worth a million euros. Good luck justifying that extra question or two.

wpietri3• 3 years ago

For what it's worth, I've also met FOIA people who are very excited by the mission of FOIA. So many government employees are really there for the mission of it! They rarely make the news, but my esteem for government workers has mainly grown the more contact I've had with them.

astrange2• 3 years ago

I always wonder where they find people to give quotes in response to events in news articles.

Obviously in politics news it's usually used for evil - like the NYTimes or local TV stations are both famous for quoting a man on the street who's just a concerned citizen, and then you look their name up and they're a lobbyist or something.

But in science news you often see expert X releasing a paper and then someone from university Y, who wasn't involved and wasn't a reviewer, quoted reacting to it. Where does the journalist find them?

kergonath3• 3 years ago

Living in Europe and working at the local version of the national labs, I would be very interested in doing this sort of things. An afternoon worth of fun with fire is well worth the paperwork. Well, as long as no radioactive materials are involved.

The technicians are there anyway and we don’t need to justify each litre of fuel we use, so there is pretty much no expense. We do all kinds of experiments for visitors somewhat regularly.

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

Even more fun if you can burn the paperwork as part of the afternoon of fire...

a-dub• 3 years ago

it's worth noting that he was a journalist who had an existing relationship with the press office. i think it might have been a different story if he were just some random guy who decided to phone up the llnl switchboard and ask if they had a good spot to burn some shit.

rbanffy3• 3 years ago

Living in Europe has, so far, made me very frustrated by how well and how completely (and responsibly) people have recycled their old computers. There is no sign IBM 3270 terminals ever existed, no DEC VT-[2|3]30s, not even our very own, very European (and very gorgeous) Nordata, Nixdorf, Olivetti, and Nokia terminals and computers. BBCs are more often found (very interesting and unique machines), as well as Commodore and Atari STs, but there is no vestige of the breathtaking richness one finds abandoned in warehouses in the middle of the US.

zabzonk2• 3 years ago

i once blew up the monitor of a next. it had been sent back to the us from the uk for repair, but when we recieved it back in the uk i didn't notice that the power selector was set to 120 rather than 240 volts. and ... bang.

the cube itself seemed a bit more resilient.

there were reports of the mag alloy airframes of lancaster bombers burning in the raf offensive on germany in ww2, but i can't find any confirmation of this.

rodgerd2• 3 years ago

Honda made an all-magnesium Formula 1 car at one point.

The result was horrific.

zabzonk2• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_RA302

for those interested. the article seems to say it was mg skinned, which would make it even more combustible, as the skin would be thin

magnesium is far from being easily machinable, so a chassis/airframe/cube made out of the pure metal is unlikely

ztrww• 3 years ago

The 1955 Le Mans disaster was even worse. 84 people died in large part because nobody close had any idea how to put out a magnesium fire…

ChrisArchitect• 3 years ago

Year ago conversation with better link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326169

dang3• 3 years ago

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Burning a Magnesium NextCube (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326169 - Aug 2021 (23 comments)

Burning a NeXT Cube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926992 - Nov 2009 (14 comments)

(link fixed now too)

vondur• 3 years ago

Is this in reference to the post on the front page about not mining and harvesting Magnesium from the oceans?

klyrs• 3 years ago

Yep, I think my comment there triggered this. Other folks are posting better links than the one I dug up from Slashdot then archive.org. I do hope that the poster or dang can update the link to one of the better ones.

Edit: oh good dang did that while I was typing

dang3• 3 years ago

Url changed from http://web.archive.org/web/20000817013818/http://simson.net/..., which points to this.

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's fine to post archive links in the comments, but please don't do it at the top level, unless you've searched and there's really no alternative.

jll29• 3 years ago

Thanks for this report, despite my initial reluctance upon reading the headline it was educational and a pleasure to read up to the last full stop.

I particularly chuckled at the line "We have problems like this all of the time".

anyfoo3• 3 years ago

I wondered the same! Not with NeXTCubes, but I used to have a Sony VAIO N505X at the end of the 90s. A beautiful, tiny laptop in a magnesium case.[1]

I vividly remembered all these demonstrations of burning magnesium strips in school, and sometimes wondered whether the case of my laptop would react the same. Of course, I liked that thing, so it always remained a question.

[1] Current pictures found on the Internet don't do it justice at all, since the paint and materials seem to have degraded to something very ugly by now.

tonylemesmer• 3 years ago

I still have my 505 Vaio. The rubber feet melted into sticky gel years ago. I put stickers on the lid so not sure what state the paint is in. Battery died a long while ago. Pretty sure the alloy these things are made from is not easily ignitable due to being close to electronics. And to make the product less expensive by alloying with cheaper metals.

jacquesm6• 3 years ago

Battery can be re-built.

You'll end up with a lot more capacity than the original if you use top of the line new cells.

helf• 3 years ago

god, I miss my NeXTs. This pains me everytime I see it, lol.

technothrasher3• 3 years ago

Back in 1997 I went dumpster diving and got my hands on eight NeXTcubes that a company was getting rid of. Ok, it wasn't exactly dumpster diving, like the time in about 1983 that I got hundreds of blank floppies, but they were on the curb and when I asked they said, sure, take them. I was excited to get the score, but I didn't really need eight of them. So I told a bunch of friends they could share the wealth. By the time I realized what I'd done, I'd promised all eight of them to people, and I felt obligated at that point to follow through. To this day I kick myself that I don't have one as a cool piece of art to display.

smm11• 3 years ago

I drove by a building with an SGI O2 next to the dumpster. Monitor, mouse, cables, and two banker's boxes full of software and manuals. Someone leaving said "have fun with it" while I was throwing it in the car. It came up with everything still intact, looking for the servers it was talking to, with data from maybe two weeks prior. This was in 2014.

jonstewart• 3 years ago

What do you want for it?

technothrasher3• 3 years ago

I've still got a couple of SGI Indigo workstations sitting on the shelf. Many fond memories of those back in the day.

sammalloy2• 3 years ago

Back in 1997 I went dumpster diving and got my hands on eight NeXTcubes that a company was getting rid of.

Heh. Was this in SF? I think I know who that was.

technothrasher3• 3 years ago

No, it was outside of Boston. I think there were a lot of places dumping NeXT hardware back then.

arcticbull• 3 years ago

These are starting to get really hard to find too. I picked one up many years ago for a couple hundred bucks because I really liked them. Very cool machines. Last I checked they're $3000-8000 each on eBay.

tasty_freeze• 3 years ago

When I was a kid, I'd go to the hobby shop and get a little jar that had magnesium strips in it. Then I'd go home and light them. Seeing metal burn was mind boggling to me, as it seemed until then that organic things burn, not metal.

Anyway, had I been in the position of the author, I would have gotten a thin strip of magnesium (easy to get going) and put that on top of the case, lit the strip, and let that ignite the case.

13of40• 3 years ago

When I was a kid, my dad always carried one of those magnesium fire starter things [1] on his keychain, and whenever we went camping he would use it to start the fire instead of matches. He never used it the way it was intended, though, which is to shave off a little pile of magnesium flakes and light that. (He used cotton from a pill jar as tinder instead.)

So 30 years later, I had one of these things in my backpack (along with a waterproof container of cotton) and I decided to get over my ADD and try the intended method with magnesium flakes. It eventually worked, but it was so much effort compared to just lighting something made of cellulose that it was hardly worth it. I think these were originally made as survival tools for pilots, so maybe having it be water-agnostic was a factor in the design, though.

[1] https://www.cheaperthandirt.com/magnesium-fire-starter-u.s.-...

mjhagen• 3 years ago

Also available in podcast form on the great Mac Folklore Radio: https://macfolkloreradio.com/2022/03/01/next-cube-aa001032.h...

kristianp• 3 years ago

"The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 has a chassis made of carbon fiber and magnesium" [1] - anyone burnt one of those?

[1] https://www.reviewgeek.com/102979/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon-...

piyh• 3 years ago

Magnesium frame, carbon fiber and epoxy touch surfaces. It would be real black and smelly.

wpietri3• 3 years ago

"This was a collapsing metal failure, melting into a pool of fire and being consumed by it. Perhaps it was a more accurate representation of NeXT's true reality."

As a former NeXT developer, I can confirm this as spot-on foreshadowing.

Hellion• 3 years ago

Considering the Phoenix like rise the platform made, it was accurate at the time but short sighted.

wpietri3• 3 years ago

Eh, sort of. Important parts of the OS did eventually get recycled. But NeXT was sold in 1996, and OS X didn't come out until 2001. And the hardware ambitions were a total crater. I'd say it worked out much better for Jobs than NeXT.

rbanffy3• 3 years ago

There is a place in hell for people who burn old computers...

mattl• 3 years ago

It was a spare case for an old computer.

rbanffy3• 3 years ago

Still blasphemy.

Burning a NeXTCube (1993)

Related Stories