On 12/4/14 7:30 AM, Sean Caron wrote:
Man, I have been interested in the Corvus Concept for
many years, ever
since I read a Creative Computing article on it when I was a youngster (not
sure it's in the ~30% of this magazine issue I still have, LOL). I don't
think I've ever seen anyone exhibiting a complete unit... I'll be
interested to see responses; this is definitely a machine that should have
a little more historical presence on the Web! Neat little system.
Some work has been done on it recently in MESS, so you can see it running in
simulation.
I've had an interest in them for thirty years, collected a bunch of them in
the 80's up through the versions that could run Unix, gave them away, and have
spent the past decade building up a small collection of them again.
They almost got it right. 68000, bitmapped display, but missed the importance
in the marketplace of a GUI. It never really evolved past it being a slightly
extended UCSD Pascal environment, though implemented with a compiled Pascal
from Silicon Valley Software. They did have built-in
networking with Omninet
and could run diskless, though.
Local peripherals were built on Apple II expansion cards (w/o DMA capability).
There was a 5" and 8" floppy disk card, and a flat cable interfaces for Corvus
hard disks and Mirror backup tapes. There was driver support for the networked
print servers.
While the MESS work was going on a month or two ago, I had thought a bit about
what it would take to write a Corvus OS driver for an Apple II CF card board.
Years ago, I had gotten a couple of low speed Apple II SCSI cards thinking I
would try getting those to work on a Concept.