Looking for: Corvus Concept parts

[Al Kossow]

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.