NeXTCube going up in flames.

October 15, 2002 8:05 PM

NeXTCube going up in flames. A photo shoot from 1993 that mirrored the companies history or just really cool. Too bad there is only one picture.
posted by riffola (12 comments total)

company's not companies, sorry.
posted by riffola at 8:07 PM on October 15, 2002

I can't believe you got me to read a million-word long recounting of lighting something on fire.
posted by RJ Reynolds at 8:35 PM on October 15, 2002

To summarize -- NeXT boxes are made out of magnesium so they burn really brightly.

Side note: Simson used to work for NeXT and now develops sbook5 for Mac and Windows.
posted by jragon at 8:48 PM on October 15, 2002

I like to burn stuff as much as the next guy, but Christ, that is a lot to go through to start something on fire....
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 8:52 PM on October 15, 2002

A triumph of the human spirit...to what lengths must we travel in pursuit of greatness?
posted by tambour at 8:57 PM on October 15, 2002

Nooo... oh god noooo...

As an owner of three cubes (I'm a bit of a pack rat), this site always made me cringe. I guess it's better that Garfinkel was the one to do this, since the NeXT was such a big part of his life. My first real Internet account was a shell account on a NeXT cluster, so in a different way it was a big part of mine...

I don my NeXT logo t-shirt in remembrance...
posted by tss at 9:05 PM on October 15, 2002

I can honestly state that a NeXT box was my very first Unix experience, in the summer of 1993 at Macalester College. I was like 13.
posted by McBain at 9:19 PM on October 15, 2002

Magnesium McBain. Thats the future.
posted by stbalbach at 9:34 PM on October 15, 2002

Shit, I burned a lawn mower deck in my driveway at age 14 using a Mapp gas torch.

Some people sure do things the hard way.
posted by pekar wood at 9:54 PM on October 15, 2002

Funny. To paraphrase, I guess NeXT went out not in a blaze, but with a whimper.

NeXT background, specs, and "before" picture here (and another "before" pic) from the very, very interesting old-computers.com site.
posted by taz at 10:01 PM on October 15, 2002

An awful lot of work to get the right 1/60 of a second. But still an interesting account of how far we have come -- permits, regulations, environmental impact statements -- since man (or woman, or whoever) invented fire.
posted by LeLiLo at 11:25 PM on October 15, 2002

"NBC placing model rocket motors on the underside of GM trucks in order to force the trucks to explode during a photo shoot." Slow newsday?
posted by blogRot at 6:40 AM on October 16, 2002