Name: Technoporn: The Cobalt Qube
Brand: wired.com
SKU: wired-com-183
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Technoporn: The Cobalt Qube

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The Qube is Dead, Long Live The Qube!Those magical Cobalt boxes made it reasonable for small businesses to have in-house web, email and file servers, long before other modern no-brainers were available. Sleek-looking blue boxes of humming, user-friendly power, these — and their siblings from Cobalt's Raq series — opened a new world of possibility just when it was needed in the mid-to-late 1990s. Bought out by Sun, the entire line was put to death shortly thereafter, leaving a thriving and ravenous fan community in the lurch.The Inquirer has a on the top 5 overpriced tech acquisitions, and the Sun-Cobalt deal is right in there. It's worth pointing out that two of the Inq's examples are cases of companies with vast oceans of excess capital who bought competition deliberatelyto kill it. Sun bought Cobalt to kill the Qube and Raq server appliances — yes, you know it's true— and it obviously had no strategy to exploit them. The only meaningful thing about Cobalt was that it made outrageously popular alternatives to Sun's own models, which require $50k-a-year IT nerds just to get running.Cobalt wasn't much of a hero, mind you. It got so annoyed at the Apple G4 Cube that it claimed to own the idea of "cube" computers, but no-one bothered to tell its lawyers about before they . Perhaps it deserved to be slaughtered for the Sun God's pleasure after all.Anyway, here's to the Qube! You shouldn't bother with one now, except as art, as the software is hopelessly out of date. But some still carry the torch, so if you have one of these blue tubs in a closet, you can get it sputtering back to life with some care and weeding. provides a linux distro with a new UI called BlueQuartz.For those of us wanting the same user-friendly deal, however, a Mac Mini with OSX Server Edition fills the hole.Most Popular

The Qube is Dead, Long Live The Qube!Those magical Cobalt boxes made it reasonable for small businesses to have in-house web, email and file servers, long before other modern no-brainers were available. Sleek-looking blue boxes of humming, user-friendly power, these — and their siblings from Cobalt's Raq series — opened a new world of possibility just when it was needed in the mid-to-late 1990s. Bought out by Sun, the entire line was put to death shortly thereafter, leaving a thriving and ravenous fan community in the lurch.The Inquirer has a on the top 5 overpriced tech acquisitions, and...

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Rob Beschizza

Wired is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has been in publication since March/April 1993. Several spin-offs have been launched, including Wired UK, Wired Italia, Wired Japan, and Wired Germany.

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Technoporn: The Cobalt Qube

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