[mrbill]

UnixWorld asked on it's April 1993 cover: "Does Steve Jobs have a future in software?"

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210

One of my prized possessions is my NeXT Cube[1], finally acquired in 2014. I'd wanted one ever since I saw the "Actual Size" marketing brochure that came out in '89 or '90.

I owned a series of slabs (mono, color, turbo color) throughout the years, but never managed to get my hands on a Cube. A friend took pity on me in '14 and sent me one, and then I got the bits (special cable) needed to hook up a VGA flat panel though the non-ADB soundbox.

NeXT steps: finding enough 4M 30pin parity SIMMs to max out the memory, then replacing the internal 18G SCSI disk (a SCA drive with an adapter) with a SCSI2SD board and MicroSD card in order to reduce the number of moving pats.

I chuckle when I realize that I spend most of my day in front of a MBP at work and a Mac Mini at home - both running what is basically the descendant of NeXTstep.

[1] https://www.mrbill.net/next/

[MrTonyD]

One time when I worked at NeXT I accidentally kicked my cube with my tennis shoe - it was under my desk. Sparks flew. I told the fellow sitting in the next office what had happened - and he wanted to see it too. We both laughed as we watched sparks flying. Before long there was a crowd around my desk - maybe six people - incredulous that it was so easy to create fireworks. Well, what we didn't know was that Steve was sitting about 3 feet away - behind an office divider. His head peeked around the divider - and he silently watched the sparks flying. We all stopped laughing and returned to our work.

Next morning everyone in the company had a paper memo on their desks (the only one I ever remember - we all used email.) It said that cubes were to be properly displayed on top of desks only. No mention of the real reason for the new policy.

[milcron]

IIRC the cases were made out of magnesium. There are videos of lighting them aflame on youtube.

[gcb0]

I recall the journalist wanting a pic for the cover of NeXT is dead edition. and even in a industrial oven he had a hard time igniting the magnesium. I think he never did. probably a magnesium alloy

[aaronbrethorst]

Oh, it burned: http://simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html

[krylon]

But still, he had to do a lot more than kick it.

[flukus]

> then replacing the internal 18G SCSI

Was that in the original? Most machines were around 100-200MB at the time, if that. I was still on an amiga with no hard drive.

[mrbill]

Not by a long shot! Put in there by the friend who threw together a working system for me from the ones he had lying around.

A lot of those original sub-gigabyte drives in the slabs eventually went out with bad bearings (oh my the screeching sounds...)

We had a few Turbo Color slabs at an ISP that I worked for in the late 90s that had been acquired from a surplus place; they had "PROPERTY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY" stickers on them and had been stripped of RAM and HDs of course.

[compuguy]

I still don't understand why they strip memory from machines from a classified setting. Once powered off, the data is only recoverable for a short time.

[avn2109]

Actually this might be evidence in favor of the claim that the NSA has fancy methods for RAM data recovery.

[flukus]

Just in case? If a technique was developed to get information off it tomorrow it would take months/years for department policy to catch up.

It could also be a hold over from when memory wasn't so volatile.

[shakna]

> Once powered off, the data is only recoverable for a short time

It comes down to defence-in-depth.

That short time is usually between seconds and minutes.

A can of compressed air can extend it a bit, but a dip in liquid nitrogen can turn the dial up a long way. Other techniques may appear in the future.

You need to trust that one of your own people won't do any tampering to extend the RAM. Much easier to verify there isn't any on the way out the door.

[grzm]

Why risk it?

[jmount]

Simple (and good policy). Defends against unknown attacks like additional circuits hidden in the ram and so on.

[yuhong]

This reminds me of 4MB 30-pin SIMMs based on 350 mil 4Mbit chips, which was hard to fit into the NeXT Cube. The early 16Mbit chips was 400 mil which is even worse and probably part of why 16MB 30-pin SIMMs was never very popular.