An old email Atari

Atari was working directly with Corvus and actually provided the Source to Atari Dos 2.0D which was modified to boot from an Atari 800's front controller jacks 3&4 from a multiplexer. Atari's also had support for the Corvus Mirror which allowed backups to highly unreliable VCR tapes - you were better off leaving your data on the HD and risking it to crash over storing your data on VHS tapes ;-) Fordham Prep in the Bronx, NY run by Father Nick Lombardi had at one time the worlds largest Atari-Corvus network with 64 Atari 800's connected through daisy-chained multiplexers to a Corvus HD. All of the 800's had a special OS board called "The Integrator" that contained modified OS code to automatically boot from a Corvus HD with no boot disk. Sadly, Fr. Nick went on to other duties and in 1997 the new head of the computer room decided to throw the entire network, 800's and Corvus away to replace them with PC's :-( The Integrator was a product designed by David Small of Gadgets by Small, who is also famous for The Magic Sac which was a cartridge that plugged into an Atari ST allowing it to run as a Macintosh. The was a bit of contriversy over the whole Magic Sac ordeal -- To use the cart you needed an old set of Mac ROM's, people were actually pulling them directly out of Apple's Dumpsters from upgrades that were performed. Apple got wind of this and a whole mess followed. I don't fully remember all of the details off hand, but it was written and reported in several Atari magazines in late 80's as well as on several BBS message boards, also on the Genie message boards as well as I recall. During power up, with an Integrator installed, by pressing the Option button on the keyboard the internal Integrator OS would display and allow the user to change settings on how to boot up, create an auto-RAMDISK,copy contents from the HD directlty to RAMDISK and other features. Atari had slated for 1984 for there to be a Corvus Omninet card for the Atari 1090XL Expansion System which was a 5 slot Expansion Chasis that connected to Atari's new line of XL computer systems. Unfortunately the 1090XL was not released and canceled when the Tramiels took over Atari and all expansion cards for it were canceled as well. Curt David Barnes wrote: