Living in Europe, I’m deeply amazed at how much help and support he got for free from a bunch of people from one of the most important (and expensive) laboratories in the world. All of that just to basically have some fun and take some pictures. I’m absolutely sure that here he would never have any support to do this. We unfortunately have forgotten how to have fun and be creative here in the old world.
As someone who's been living in the US for a while, but who grew up, lived, and worked in Germany all my life before, I'm not sure what you mean.
Me and engineers I knew were humans who liked fun (and especially had curiosity), too. As long as proper safety precautions are taken, why not? Seems like it wasn't very different here, either:
> "I need to have an MDS --- a Material Date Safety Shet --- on the paint before I can let you burn it," he said.
Sure but would you expect Fraunhofer (or something like that) to just give away resources and human hours to just burn a computer case? Of course Europeans have fun, that was just hyperbole; but institutionally speaking, it’s an extremely rigid place. You might even question whether it was ok to spend those resources. Maybe it wasn’t. But every time I go to the USA I’m positively impressed by how much they have the freedom to make decisions. In Europe all we do is follow the rules.
I don’t know about Fraunhofer but my experience in other European countries (mainly the UK, France and Italy) is that you just need to be nice with someone with access to the facilities you need. Unless you need something very specific (read dangerous), there is no problem. We don’t let visitors play with the instruments or anything, but we’re happy to do it for them if we have the right gear and our schedule permits.
In more serious cases (if things like hydrofluoric acid, liquid sodium, or uranium are needed), then sure there would need to be a risk assessment, the health and safety people would need to get involved, and visitors could not be present. But otherwise there is pretty much no problem. In general, the decision would be taken with no involvement of any manager beyond the team level (~20 people). And that would be following the rules in place.
Great to know your experience! Maybe I’m in the wrong country, but my experience here is that nobody will lift a finger for you unless (a) it is part of their previuosly allocated workload and (b) it is risk-free. By risk-free I mean really risk free; even wrongly spending 10 euro in a ham sandwich could get you fired and in legal trouble. Plus, just getting people to spend a few minutes to talk to you (if it’s not their preallocated duty to do so) is a nightmare, let alone expect them to actually make an unorthodox decision.
It's not something I would expect to happen in the US today; the 90s were a very different time. Maybe due to 9/11? But the same amount you're impressed here, I as an American am also surprised. It feels like this story is from a different country than the USA to me. All we do now is follow the rules.
Sears used to be like this back in the day, and this other place, my memory tells me it is Montgomery Ward but I have doubts if that's right.
We brought a machine up there one day and the guy at the window breaks the thing down right there on the spot so young-me at the time could get an explainer of what he was doing. To little me that was the future, and this person taking their time to explain it to me was like an elder passing on their history. My little record button was firmly pressed.
Yeah, 9/11 changed the mood considerably here, but I blame the no-fun-at-work on the Internet bubble of the turn of the millennium. Since then everything is about money and only about money.
I was making 100's of boards in probably the best equipped tech lab in Europe because the project I was working on was fun and the people that ran the lab figured that if it is going to be done it might as well be done well. Oh, and here are they keys to the parts locker, please do tally what you use and don't worry, we won't charge you, it's just so we know what to re-order...
So yes, that does happen. And that was a lot more substantial than some help burning up a computer case. Also, this www thingy, that's someone's side project.
I did better: I helped track down a really nasty problem in one of their series boards, which happened to use a CPU that I was pretty good at programming at the time. Lots of fun!
I’m deeply amazed at how much help and support he got for free from a bunch of people from one of the most important (and expensive) laboratories in the world
As a former journalist, it truly is amazing the amount of free information that comes out of America's government, and the vast number of truly helpful people who work there.
I can't count the number of times I didn't understand something I read in a federal document, and was able to pick up the phone and within 15 minutes or so be in touch either with the person who wrote it, or someone who knew the topic intimately. Very often, they would follow-up with stacks of documentation by mail.
And I'm not talking about conversing with public relations people or media people or others who are paid to talk to the media. But regular federal staffers who really just wanted to make sure I understood things.
The Congressional Budget Office, and the General Services Administration stick in my memory as being especially helpful.
Sadly, it's the bad bureaucrats who get all the notoriety, and state/local offices have become markedly worse over recent years, as budgets have been cut and the Freedom of Information Act backfired, turning everything into a firewalled process. But there are still plenty of people out there who remember that every... single... thing... the federal government produces is the property of the people, which is why it's illegal for a federal agency to assert copyright over anything it created with tax dollars.
For what it's worth, I've also met FOIA people who are very excited by the mission of FOIA. So many government employees are really there for the mission of it! They rarely make the news, but my esteem for government workers has mainly grown the more contact I've had with them.
Exactly. The amazing thing about America is how these people just pop up spontaneously. They get a salary just like we do but for some reason some (many?) of them just have this spark to go further. I love that you mentioned actually talking to people to solve problems. In the Nordic countries it feels like every minute of every person is worth a million euros. Good luck justifying that extra question or two.
I always wonder where they find people to give quotes in response to events in news articles.
Obviously in politics news it's usually used for evil - like the NYTimes or local TV stations are both famous for quoting a man on the street who's just a concerned citizen, and then you look their name up and they're a lobbyist or something.
But in science news you often see expert X releasing a paper and then someone from university Y, who wasn't involved and wasn't a reviewer, quoted reacting to it. Where does the journalist find them?
Can't comment for America, but in New Zealand most of our universities ether have an opt-in media expertise database, encourage browsing through the normal staff profiles to find someone, or encourage media to get in touch with a central point of contact to find someone to comment.
Living in Europe and working at the local version of the national labs, I would be very interested in doing this sort of things. An afternoon worth of fun with fire is well worth the paperwork. Well, as long as no radioactive materials are involved.
The technicians are there anyway and we don’t need to justify each litre of fuel we use, so there is pretty much no expense. We do all kinds of experiments for visitors somewhat regularly.
it's worth noting that he was a journalist who had an existing relationship with the press office. i think it might have been a different story if he were just some random guy who decided to phone up the llnl switchboard and ask if they had a good spot to burn some shit.
Living in Europe has, so far, made me very frustrated by how well and how completely (and responsibly) people have recycled their old computers. There is no sign IBM 3270 terminals ever existed, no DEC VT-[2|3]30s, not even our very own, very European (and very gorgeous) Nordata, Nixdorf, Olivetti, and Nokia terminals and computers. BBCs are more often found (very interesting and unique machines), as well as Commodore and Atari STs, but there is no vestige of the breathtaking richness one finds abandoned in warehouses in the middle of the US.
Back in 1997 I went dumpster diving and got my hands on eight NeXTcubes that a company was getting rid of. Ok, it wasn't exactly dumpster diving, like the time in about 1983 that I got hundreds of blank floppies, but they were on the curb and when I asked they said, sure, take them. I was excited to get the score, but I didn't really need eight of them. So I told a bunch of friends they could share the wealth. By the time I realized what I'd done, I'd promised all eight of them to people, and I felt obligated at that point to follow through. To this day I kick myself that I don't have one as a cool piece of art to display.
I drove by a building with an SGI O2 next to the dumpster. Monitor, mouse, cables, and two banker's boxes full of software and manuals. Someone leaving said "have fun with it" while I was throwing it in the car. It came up with everything still intact, looking for the servers it was talking to, with data from maybe two weeks prior. This was in 2014.
These are starting to get really hard to find too. I picked one up many years ago for a couple hundred bucks because I really liked them. Very cool machines. Last I checked they're $3000-8000 each on eBay.
If they still spin up. Better not wait too long, one day you'll try and find them seized. If the motor shaft is exposed you may want to try to loosen it up before applying power that might save you a lot of headaches.
Besides missing the quality of writing in some of the better 80/early 90s computer mags (mostly familiar with US/UK), I also really miss the amount of money/skill/love they spent on getting high class photography and/or illustrations for the cover and key articles.
This (1993) was on the tail end of that phenomenon.
I wondered the same! Not with NeXTCubes, but I used to have a Sony VAIO N505X at the end of the 90s. A beautiful, tiny laptop in a magnesium case.[1]
I vividly remembered all these demonstrations of burning magnesium strips in school, and sometimes wondered whether the case of my laptop would react the same. Of course, I liked that thing, so it always remained a question.
[1] Current pictures found on the Internet don't do it justice at all, since the paint and materials seem to have degraded to something very ugly by now.
I still have my 505 Vaio. The rubber feet melted into sticky gel years ago. I put stickers on the lid so not sure what state the paint is in. Battery died a long while ago. Pretty sure the alloy these things are made from is not easily ignitable due to being close to electronics. And to make the product less expensive by alloying with cheaper metals.
"This was a collapsing metal failure, melting into a pool of fire and being consumed by it. Perhaps it was a more accurate representation of NeXT's true reality."
As a former NeXT developer, I can confirm this as spot-on foreshadowing.
Eh, sort of. Important parts of the OS did eventually get recycled. But NeXT was sold in 1996, and OS X didn't come out until 2001. And the hardware ambitions were a total crater. I'd say it worked out much better for Jobs than NeXT.
The guy who did this (Simpson Garfinkel) was known for writing several books about programming for the NeXT. He later wrote a book on Cocoa programming in the early years of OS X that was clearly just a modification of one of his NeXT books (as especially in the early versions OS X was basically still NeXTStep underneath), so Garfinkel managed to get something out of his NeXT days despite the symbolic ending of it by burning his cube.
When I was a kid, I'd go to the hobby shop and get a little jar that had magnesium strips in it. Then I'd go home and light them. Seeing metal burn was mind boggling to me, as it seemed until then that organic things burn, not metal.
Anyway, had I been in the position of the author, I would have gotten a thin strip of magnesium (easy to get going) and put that on top of the case, lit the strip, and let that ignite the case.
When I was a kid, my dad always carried one of those magnesium fire starter things [1] on his keychain, and whenever we went camping he would use it to start the fire instead of matches. He never used it the way it was intended, though, which is to shave off a little pile of magnesium flakes and light that. (He used cotton from a pill jar as tinder instead.)
So 30 years later, I had one of these things in my backpack (along with a waterproof container of cotton) and I decided to get over my ADD and try the intended method with magnesium flakes. It eventually worked, but it was so much effort compared to just lighting something made of cellulose that it was hardly worth it. I think these were originally made as survival tools for pilots, so maybe having it be water-agnostic was a factor in the design, though.
i once blew up the monitor of a next. it had been sent back to the us from the uk for repair, but when we recieved it back in the uk i didn't notice that the power selector was set to 120 rather than 240 volts. and ... bang.
the cube itself seemed a bit more resilient.
there were reports of the mag alloy airframes of lancaster bombers burning in the raf offensive on germany in ww2, but i can't find any confirmation of this.
You really don't want to use pure magnesium anywhere you can avoid it. But alloys are perfectly safe and are even permitted for airplane cabin construction.
It's quite ok to machine, though it tears easily so you have to be careful on your final pass not to accidentally remove much more material than you intend to.
And if it is pure magnesium you'll want to be pretty careful about your cutting speeds and coolant ;)
That crash looks horrific by the way. Whoever thought that combination was a good idea didn't have their head screwed on properly. That really was quite predictable.
> A second RA302 was built, with slight modifications, earmarked for Surtees to drive at the 1968 Italian Grand Prix, but he again refused to drive it.
They built a car so flammable their driver refused to drive it. The driver they used in his place was then incinerated on the 2nd lap. So they built another equally flammable car and asked the first driver if maybe he'd now be up for driving it?
This was the era when it was normal to have at least one fatality per season amongst the drivers; 1968 had five drivers killed (although not all at Grand Prix). Safety features such as barriers were optional at tracks, and could be straw bales, spectators had no minimum distance from the track, fire extinguishers were optional. Fuel tanks with bladders weren't introduced until 1970, rescue equipment and firefighting crews weren't required until 1973, flame retardent suits weren't standardised until 1975.
Oh, and medical facilities and staff weren't required until 1980.
It was an era when drivers were considered completely expendable, and being concerned with safety was cowardice.
We tried burning a small part of a Tadpole Sparcbook case (which was also a magnesium alloy) and it was hard work. I think we had to file the surface down to remove the surface oxide and then attack it with a blowtorch.
Yep, I think my comment there triggered this. Other folks are posting better links than the one I dug up from Slashdot then archive.org. I do hope that the poster or dang can update the link to one of the better ones.
