On 2/4/2018 6:22 AM, Lou via vcf-midatlantic wrote:

Great to hear you got one of the NeXTstations working! I might actually be heading up to the museum today with the missus so it would actually be neat to see one of these working in person (especially since I will be getting my hands on a complete unit soon).

As for the other unit and hardware password, have you tried booting it without the PRAM battery? I read somewhere that the PRAM stores the hardware password and booting it without the battery installed (and waiting a few minutes) it will try to boot from network but can be configured to drive. I do not know if this was attempted yet but in any case if we are heading up today we can talk more about it if the museum isn't swamped.

Here's hoping we can figure this out!

I'm pretty sure the hardware password isn't preserved by the battery. A dead battery (or no battery) on a NeXT (at least a station, I can't comment on a cube, any one want to donate one?!) equates to a seemingly dead computer. Press the power key on the keyboard and nothing happens. Then, to add insult to injury, when you put a fresh battery in, it defaults to netboot... which presents itself as if the HD has failed (unless you just happen to hook it up to a network that can netboot a NeXt.. riiiight). So no joy when it comes to booting with the battery. But such joy to know you might get to enjoy the display machine today! -Adam