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Garfinkel, Senior Editor, NeXTWORLD Magazine Subject:NeXTCube Serial Number AA001032 Date: March 16, 1993 Dear Dan, I am writing this memo to explain what happened to the case our NeXTCube Computer, Serial Number AA001032. Although magnesium is a relatively expensive metal, it is remarkably strong and lightweight. No doubt, this let NeXT save on shipping expenses, although the added handling and manufacturing costs was one of the factors which led to the cube's high cost. At the time that NeXT brought their system to market, the only other company to incorporate a magnesium case was Grid, which was making a portable computer. When I was in high school, I used to steal magnesium metal from the chemistry lab and set it on fire in my backyard. Of course, at more than seven thousand dollars each, I doubted that anybody would ever actually carry out the experiment. Anyway, during the fall of 1991, I interviewed Rich Page, NeXT's then vice-president for hardware, for an article which we later ran in NeXTWORLD Extra. Page if he could get me an empty NeXT Cube case for the purpose of having such a burning. Page smiled and said that he thought something could be arranged. A few days later, he called me up and said that I could pick up an empty cube at NeXT's Freemont factory. I imagined that the magnesium would burn brightly and the fire would move slowly down the sides, a triumphant expression of the power of NeXT's technology to set the world afire. I drove down to Freemont the next day and picked up the cube, which was waiting for me behind behind the receptionist desk at the factory. Page had delivered exactly what I had asked for --- an empty magnesium case, without any electronics, back plane, or rubber feet. The case was also missing the NeXT logo, but you can't get everything. I put it in the back of my Jeep and drove back to my apartment in Berkeley. Over the next few months, I tried to think of some way to ignite the magnesium. One idea that I had was to use a mixture of potassium permaganate and glycerin, which bursts into flames and produces an enormous amount of heat after just a few minutes. I asked a chemist friend if he could supply me with the ingredients: he suggested that I simply use a MAP gas torch. Unfortunately, I left California before I was able to carry out the experiment. A year later, Sophia told me that she was sick of keeping the cube. I came out to California and transferred the cube from Sophia's house to your basement. By this time, we had started to hear rumors that NeXT might be discontinuing its cube in favor of the "NeXT Brick," a RISC-based computer. I started thinking that we might want to use a photograph of the burning cube for the cover of that issue that announced the NeXT Cube's demise. The day NeXT publicly announced that it was discontinuing its hardware line, you called me up and said that it was time for us to burn the NeXT Cube in your basement. I was coming out to California to attend the third annual conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy: it seemed like an ideal time to conduct the burning. Getting a torch would be easy, and now with the news peg, you told me that you were willing to pay for the photographer. The only problem, of course, was where to do the actual burning. The whole time that I had thought about burning the cube, I had not thought much about where we would actually conduct the experiment: I had always assumed that we would go to parking lot, or walk down to a beach, light the computer with a torch, snap a few photographs, and then wait for the magneisum to burn itself out. But as I began to consider what would be really involved with the burning, I realized that we would need to be more professional. The real reason for my concern was to protect the magazine from legal liability. As I've already said, magnesium burns with a brilliant white flame and a tremendous amount of white smoke. Although the smoke is non-toxic, I realized that the smoke might attract the attention of a passing police officer or the fire department. We could then be fined for conducting an open-air burning without a permit or causing a fire hazard or something like that. For these reasons, the week before I came out to California, I started calling fire departments in the Bay Area to find out how we could get a permit for burning the cube. I must have called ten different departments --- each one told me that they didn't give such permits anymore. I was also told that I would have to call the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to get a waiver from the emission laws, that to get the waiver I needed to file an application and have a hearing, and that even then the waiver was not guaranteed. I also tried calling numerous analytical laboratories in the Bay Area to see if any of them had the facilities and the necessary permits to conduct the burning. Most of the labs had faciities for burning a few grams of magneisum, but nothing as large as a NeXT Cube. Finally, in frustration, I decided that I would go through with my original plan --- driving out to the desert and setting the cube off with a torch. I imagined that we would drive east on Interstate 580, find a desolate country road, and then drive north or something. It was then that I remembered that Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a Laboratory owned by the Department of Energy and run by the University of California at Berkeley. The Livermore Lab is a located in Livermore, Califonria --- just 20 miles from San Francisco, out Interstate 580. I had been at the lab in 1989 for an article I was writing for the Christian Science Monitor. Back then, the people in the press office had been very helpful. I was sure that a national weapons laboratory would have the facilities for burning a few kilograms of magneisum. My next phone call was to the press office at Livermore, which referred me to the community relations group. Now, every time in the past when I had called a fire department or a laboratory to tell them what I wanted to do, I had to spend several minutes telling them what I wanted to burn, why I wanted to burn it, why I was having a hard time finding a place where I could do the burn, and a variety of other things. We need to know if there is anything that might be toxic. We have reports to fill out with the EPA just like everybody else," he said. Then, as an afterthought, I added: "The case is painted. In the meantime, Burt said, he would check into our using site 300. I remembered that there had been some traffic in the NeXT news groups about the paint that NeXT had used on its computers --- mostly it was from people who had purchased external disk drives and wanted to paint them with the exact shade of black used by NeXT. I didn't have a copy of the archives on my computer, so I sent a message to the BCS-NeXT mailing list; Perkins had gone to great lengths to ind out the exact shade of paint. He sent me the following information: Sparyon Paint Omni-Packblend 4Next-Black (icon black) LAV-16 25216 Sprayon Paints had offices in both Ohio and California. I told them that I wanted to burn a computer and needed to know what was in the paint. That's when I learned that most of the people in the hardware division had by this time been fired. Somebody in hardware maintenance told me to call an outfit called Chicago Metals. He didn't have a phone number for them, so I called directory assistance for Chicago and got a phone number. I told the person that there had to be some right-to-know paperwork for the people who were applying the paint to the cubes. Unfortunately, the person responsible for the paperwork had been fired. Finally, I got the name of an engineer who had worked on the Cube's power supply. He told me that NeXT didn't paint its own computers --- the painting was done by a finishing company in San Jose. When I called up that company, I told them that I had a potential environmental accident and that I needed to know the exact paints that they had used. A call to Sherin-Williams revealed that the paint was a non-toxic water soluble paint. When I called Burt back, however, there was some bad news. Livermore's head Fire Safety expert di...
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