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Burning a NeXTCube (1993)
- bertrandom 4y agoThis may be a better link: https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html as it has links to the actual photos on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nitroba/albums/72157594435480450 https://www.flickr.com/photos/nitroba/albums/721575944354804...
- dang 4y agoChanged now (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34586795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34586795). Thanks!
- aardvark179 4y agoWe 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 4y agoBesides 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 4y agoi loved NeXTworld Magazine (not sure i got the lowercase and uppercase letters right)
- sammalloy 4y agoIt sounds like the OP was describing Mondo 2000.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoGiven that magnesium alloy car wheels often survive car fires with barely more than the surface spalling off, I don't know what they expected.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- low_tech_love 4y agoLiving 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.
- anyfoo 4y agoAs 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 4y agoThe US is surprisingly Germanic so it could be a common cultural thread.
- low_tech_love 4y agoSure 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.
- kergonath 4y agoI don’t know about Fraunhofer but my experience in other European countries (mainly the UK, France and Italy) is that you just need to be nice with someone with access to the facilities you need. Unless you need something very specific (read dangerous), there is no problem. We don’t let visitors play with the instruments or anything, but we’re happy to do it for them if we have the right gear and our schedule permits. In more serious cases (if things like hydrofluoric acid, liquid sodium, or uranium are needed), then sure there would need to be a risk assessment, the health and safety people would need to get involved, and visitors could not be present. But otherwise there is pretty much no problem. In general, the decision would be taken with no involvement of any manager beyond the team level (~20 people). And that would be following the rules in place.
- zabzonk 4y agoi 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.
- rodgerd 4y agoHonda made an all-magnesium Formula 1 car at one point. The result was horrific.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zabzonk 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_RA302 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
- jacquesm 4y agoYou really don't want to use pure magnesium anywhere you can avoid it. But alloys are perfectly safe and are even permitted for airplane cabin construction. It's quite ok to machine, though it tears easily so you have to be careful on your final pass not to accidentally remove much more material than you intend to. And if it is pure magnesium you'll want to be pretty careful about your cutting speeds and coolant ;) That crash looks horrific by the way. Whoever thought that combination was a good idea didn't have their head screwed on properly. That really was quite predictable.
- omnicognate 4y ago
- ChrisArchitect 4y agoYear ago conversation with better link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326169
- dang 4y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Burning a Magnesium NextCube (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326169 - Aug 2021 (23 comments) Burning a NeXT Cube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926992 - Nov 2009 (14 comments) (link fixed now too)
- vondur 4y agoIs this in reference to the post on the front page about not mining and harvesting Magnesium from the oceans?
- klyrs 4y agoYep, 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
- dang 4y agoUrl changed from http://web.archive.org/web/20000817013818/http://simson.net/photos/hacks/cubefire.html 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 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 4y agoThanks 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".
- anyfoo 4y agoI 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 4y agoI 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.
- jacquesm 4y agoBattery 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 4y agogod, I miss my NeXTs. This pains me everytime I see it, lol.
- technothrasher 4y agoBack 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoWhat do you want for it?
- technothrasher 4y agoI've still got a couple of SGI Indigo workstations sitting on the shelf. Many fond memories of those back in the day.
- sammalloy 4y 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.
- technothrasher 4y agoNo, it was outside of Boston. I think there were a lot of places dumping NeXT hardware back then.
- tasty_freeze 4y agoWhen 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 4y agoWhen 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.-miitary-nsn-4240-01-160-5618-made-in-u.s.a./FC-021929512429.html https://www.cheaperthandirt.com/magnesium-fire-starter-u.s.-...
- mjhagen 4y agoAlso available in podcast form on the great Mac Folklore Radio: https://macfolkloreradio.com/2022/03/01/next-cube-aa001032.html https://macfolkloreradio.com/2022/03/01/next-cube-aa001032.h...
- kristianp 4y 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-gen-9-review-too-much-money-for-lackluster-specs/ https://www.reviewgeek.com/102979/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon-...
- piyh 4y agoMagnesium frame, carbon fiber and epoxy touch surfaces. It would be real black and smelly.
- wpietri 4y 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 4y agoConsidering the Phoenix like rise the platform made, it was accurate at the time but short sighted.
- wpietri 4y agoEh, 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.
- jhbadger 4y agoThe guy who did this (Simpson Garfinkel) was known for writing several books about programming for the NeXT. He later wrote a book on Cocoa programming in the early years of OS X that was clearly just a modification of one of his NeXT books (as especially in the early versions OS X was basically still NeXTStep underneath), so Garfinkel managed to get something out of his NeXT days despite the symbolic ending of it by burning his cube.
- rbanffy 4y agoThere is a place in hell for people who burn old computers...