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| Burning Hot NeXT AA001032 |
| Written by Chris Tangora | ||||
| Wednesday, 04 June 2008 | ||||
 As WWDC approaches I've decided to turn back the books to a story about the early years of Steve Jobs. Oh, the good old days of NeXT, when Steve Jobs thought all computers would be boxes in the future (i.e. the Cube). The NeXT cube (and system) was revolutionary, while the contents might have been outdated the case was magnesium alloy, a light weight flame resistant metal.As NeXT was halting it's hardware production in 1993 Simson Gafinkel of NeXTWORLD decided to see what it would take to make a NeXT cube burst into flames. They secured an empty NeXT case in 1991 for this purpose, but never got around to it. A year or two passed and NeXT hardware was closing shop. When they publicly announced the halt of the hardware production the editors at NeXTWORLD knew it was time to burn a box. They then went in search of a suitable location for burning a magnesium alloy case. Skip the background, show me the pictures.  After search multiple locations and getting turned down by almost every
place in the Bay Area, Simson (the mastermind behind this scheme)
contacted the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, run by the University of California at Berkley. They had the capacity to safely burn the NeXT case and said they would gladly do it. After tracking down the toxin report for the paint on the NeXT cube they were ready for it to burn. As a last minute addition Simsong found a broken NeXT cube at the offices of NeXTWORLD and asked to take it as a backup. That was met with quite a bit of disagreement, but in the end NeXT cube AA001032 was stripped down and it's fate was set.
At Lawrence Livermore Laboratories they had one hell of a time burning the cube, alot harder than they thought. After numerous attempts they finally got the first cube to melt into a smoldering pile of magnesium. But, they were a little sad that it took the box to go all the way down to a pile of molten metal to get the white flames they so wanted to see. That is when the AA001032 case came out. With a smoldering pile of magnesium as a base, they placed the empty NeXT cube on top and watched as it melted quickly. The pictures are awesome. Take a look and think about it when Steve is introducing something new next, especially if it is a square case made out of magnesium.Nitroba's Flickr set of the case burning Read about it in Simsong's own words. NeXTWORLD archives From Macenstein
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