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:
What would you like to know about Corvus and Atari?
Loooong time ago
I ran a Multi-user BBS system with 2 Atari 800's and a Corvus 10mb
disk attached to each Atari through joystick ports #3 and 4. Now
THOSE were the days!
David Barnes
davebarnes AT adelphia DOT net
OpenVMS , Tru64 , Solaris , Linux , OS X , SGI Irix
On Mar 10, 2007, at 3:19 AM, <Ming_Mae at hotmail.com> wrote:
"the resident Atari Maniac with a side
fetish for Mindset and Corvus
systems,
now playing with a VAX.....Curt"
Just a blind shot in the dark trying to find someone who knows about
Corvus
Systems and Atari 8-bits>
We had heard one time that Ataris had beenn hooked to a Corvus system
and
were wondering if you had any info.
Thank you for your time
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1:58 PM