When Rubik cubes were new on the market and I had not seen or even heard of Rubik Cubes a work colleague handed me a cube. He and his family had given up on it and he thought I might solve it.
The cube would come out of my desk drawer at every spare moment. I slowly realised that certain repeated movements would return some blocks to a same state whilst manipulating the positions or rotational positions of other blocks. I wrote down the patterns of movements I made and the changes they made. None of that is easy when your start position is scrambled. I have to confess I did on occasion take the cube apart and reassemble it in a completed state.
Eventually I put together a solution as per that shown below. It was a lengthy process when compared to solve processes since derived by others. But it worked and unlike modern solutions it was based on just two move sequences or algorithms, as they are often called.
I am no Rubik cube speed merchant but I can scramble a cube and comfortably solve it while the TV adverts are on – using any one of the methods described – not very fast I know but my brain and hands no longer work as they once did.
In retirement one of my interests was in 3d programming using the virtual reality modelling language (VRML) that gave rise to X3D, I learnt to program in Java, javascript and x3d and built several cubes that worked. You can see one such example on this site along with other 3d animations.