An old email Atari

[Curt - Atari Museum]

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
>>
>> --No virus found in this outgoing message.
>> Checked by AVG Free Edition.
>> Version: 7.5.446 / Virus Database: 268.18.7/710 - Release Date: 3/4/2007
>> 1:58 PM
>>
>
>