TBL's NeXT had a health check and hard drive was cloned

Robert Cailliau gave me contact details for a group in Lausanne connected to the EPFL who cloned the TBL NeXT's hard drive and gave the machine a health check some time ago. Am in touch to see how they might help, and what data they have.

Comments

Heard from Cédric Gaudin at EPFL, who says: 

We have made a check-up of the NeXT, removed the dust, changed the lithium battery of the RTC and made a backup of the hard drive (we have some pictures of the operation but you will need an approval of the CERN to publish them).
The data of the hard drive have been written on a bootable linux CD-ROM.
Robert Cailliau has at least one copies of this CD-ROM (this other copy was for Tim).

We do not have a copy of this hard drive simply because its data is not in our property.

You should ask either Robert Cailliau or Tim Berners-Lee.

Follow-up from message from Cédric:

  1. Health check was done in August 2009, with Robert Cailliau present
  2. Photographs of the procedure were taken by aBCM - have requested copies
  3. Only two CD-ROMs of the NeXT hard drive were produced: one for Robert, one for Tim B-L

Thanks for this update. Is there any further documentation (hardware/software used, disk image vs. backup, imaging process, etc.) that could be provided? This is a case where we really should have as much provenance as possible, esp. given the amount of use the image will likely see as this project moves forward.

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