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.

Someone sent them up the bomb!

The server's what's on fire!
...or is it the Microsoft Worm (tm)?

Firewalls

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"

Hm...

Looks a lot like what we used to do with old Apple II's back in Electronics class, only there was more of a BOOM, and less flame.

Ahh, those were happier times.

Burning magnesium

I used to shave and burn (DowMetal) magnesium as a kid. Made my own sparklers with iron filings, magnesium powder and sulphur. :)

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.

Re:Burning magnesium

VW engin blocks are fun. We got one once and put it on a fire pit at the beach. We were about 2 blocks away once it got burning and could still feel the heat and it was bright as day out there at 02:00.
"No officer that was here when we got here." "We thought about putting it out but couldn't get close enough."

Re:Burning magnesium

Yeah, Magnesium alloys typically provide their own oxygen when they burn. Wrong. Metals (alloys or otherwise) do not contain oxygen. However magnesium has sufficient affinity for oxygen that when it's hot, it will rip H2O apart to get more oxygen. That is, spray water on burning magnesium, you supply it with oxygen AND it releases hydrogen gas, which will drift til it mixes with some non-oxygen depleted air, and then probably ignite...

Ugh!

Material Safety Data Sheet == MSDS. Not Material Date Safety Sheet. A real chemist would know that.

MSDS for Magnesium

MSDS [cornell.edu] for Magnesium

To bad Juanita [pdq.net] didn't have a magnesium flare during her crisis.

The CIA and NeXT

Funny story.

A few years ago there was a ton of NeXT stuff for sale on the net but every system was missing a HD. Seems that these systems came from the CIA. They sold the computers to a junk dealer, but removed the hard drives in order to insure that the data was nuked! The hard drives ended up going through a metal shreaded and got mix into the new asphalt that they were using to re-pave the parking lots at the CIA HQ. This is a true story.

On another note, I worked with someone at my last job that worked at NeXT (help design the motherboards). He told me that they used to take defective cubes and burn them at a big bonfire a few times a year. He had pictures. I will have to see if I can scan get 'em and scan 'em.

Magnesium - Nice

You should try putting an old VW Beetle engine block in a fire. That big lump of Mg alloy makes night into day. Much fun...

What's the problem?

I haven't been able to see the site yet but the problem seems very simple to me. A small pile of magnesium powder and a bit of detergent and water and you should be able to ignite virtually any piece of solid magnesium (and possibly a lot of the surroundings). Don't try it at home though.

google cache

At least most of the page is available for perusing on the Google cache:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:oudSX-rG5cA:s imson.net/photos/hacks/cubefire.html+site:simson.n et+next&hl=en [google.com]

d00de

People at Next did this years ago...

I've worked with a few ex-Next people in my time. They told stories about taking defective cases to the beach and building magnesium bonfires. They did say that it was quite difficult to get them lit. Unfortunately I can't recall their method. (One of these people works at Telocity/DirecTV - given the previously mentioned "smoking gateways" it's a good thing that _they_ didn't use a magnesium case.)

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!

What happened to the site?

I've got a 1.1 Mbps SDSL link, but my primary server had a CPU problem and so now the web server is running off a 200Mhz K6 computer. It's plenty fine most of the time, but it can't handle the 5hits/sec that Slashdotters were sending at me. So I shut down the web server.

Try again in a few days.... If you want me to drop you an email when it is back up, drop a note to [e-mail]

I may even have t-shirts with the burning cube on them!

Some one had to say it...

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!

____________________________________

Slashdotted...

Wow, that's gotta be some sort of world record slashdot effect...No comments and it's down...

Here's how it's done

1 - Set NeXT Cube up as a server

2 - Post Story link on /.

3 - Pictures tomorrow...

NeXT boxes

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.......

This is/was a magazine article.

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.

They destroy a cube...

so you slashdot their homepage.

How considerate!

Anodized

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?

Re:Anodized

Was the Magnesium anodized?

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

Re:Anodized

I can answer this as a materials engineer.

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.

summary

to the fucks who blather their mouths without reading the article. He burned 2 NeXT cube cases. One was a blank case he obtained solely for that purpose, the other was just the outer shell of a functional case.

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.

Mg

Never had trouble setting magnesium on fire....

mirror

Fscking lameness filter... Mirror: Now WITH pictures :-) http://web.thock.com/cubefire.htm

Kind of Cool, But Kind of Stupid

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?

Re:Kind of Cool, But Kind of Stupid

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


Dunno. Is that made of magnesium too?

magnesium cigarettes

was i the only one that used to steal thin, long strips of magnesium from school, slide them into a cigarette and then cheerily offer them around to that person who would *always* pay you back tomorrow?

bought a whole new meaning to getting blind

that hard to burn it? =D

it would make one wonder..why would it be so hard to burn? shouldnt covering it in gasoline and lighting a match work? =D

An alternate way...

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'...

FOR GODS SAKE READ THE WHOLE THING !

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.

Preliminary Experiments to Fire-Resistant Cases?

This experiment should better be lead into research on fire-resistant cases, rather than just burning them. Considering many corporations important data today stored in PCs, fire-resistant cases would be an attractive solution -- especially if it is comboed with redundant power supply to make "indestructible server"... Cool... DoD would certainly order those. Yeah... it's still vulnerable to hammers... :-)

paint

Why didn't he just sandblast the paint off?

Cube + 3 NeXTdimensions

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.

I always knew...

I always knew there was a reason that I spent chemistry classes at school burning various aparatus over a bunsen burner.. it was so I could grow up to follow in the footsteps of such luminaries as The NeXT cube burning man. I imagine he will be at the next burning man festival with his own NeXT cube effigy and a blowtorch... seriously strange.

Great quote from the article :)

"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 :))

mirror

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

Why?

Why would someone try to do this? Perhaps it's explained on the page, but I can't get through to it right now. Anyway, I would love to have one of these, and I'd much rather see it given to someone who wants it than have it destroyed.

This is kind of old...

This is kind of old news, even for Slashdot. Simson Garfinkel (who has been mentioned on this site before [slashdot.org]) 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.

I think Don MacLean was there...

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...

Anyone rememember flash-cubes?

When I called Burt back, however, there was some bad news. Livermore's head Fire Safety expert didn't want us burning the cube outdoors: he wanted us to burn it in their "burn cell," a brick-and-steel box that had been built specifically for burning materials that might be hazardous. The burn cell was equipped with a sophisticated ventilation system for filtering the smoke and removing any toxins. The burn cell also had fire safety equipment around the facility in case the fire got out of hand.

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.

Destroying Art

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?

Re:Uh huh huh. Fire. Cool. Henh. Yeah, yeah!

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

Torching a Brokeswagen

I thought my uncle was off his rocker when he proposed it to me, but sure enough, he set an old Volkswagen engine on fire one Friday night (things get kinda lonely in Cherokee County, Georgia). It took about 2 hours, but he finally got it to catch.

We saw a little spark now and then, which I thought was cool, but his persistent stirring of the wood fire created enough heat and the thing took off like a rocket (the fire, that is). Mighty bright, it was! All the neighbors turned off all the lights and we were able to read a newspaper with no trouble over 500 feet away from the blaze.

Re:Regarding Heating ...

Forget overclocking ... can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these? :-)

Re:Nice waste of time and money..

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.

Re:Regarding Heating ...

Nope. They were notoriously finnicky about speed. The RAM was timed to the clock, and everything went haywire if you tried to overclock it. The best that happened were the Nitro/Pyro processor replacements. But they number in the hundreds, as I understand it, so you're stuck with your 25 or 33MHz black hardware. And that's enough for me =)

Re:Thanks for crashing my server

heh