Xref: utzoo comp.protocols.misc:1088 comp.os.cpm:4357 alt.folklore.computers:7019 Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!noose.ecn.purdue.edu!en.ecn.purdue.edu!milton From: milton@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Milton D Miller) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.misc,comp.os.cpm,alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Early microcomputer networks Message-ID: <1990Nov13.210141.28709@en.ecn.purdue.edu> Date: 13 Nov 90 21:01:41 GMT References: <15662.273ad3d6@levels.sait.edu.au> <1990Nov12.232142.16577@ddsw1.MCS.COM> Organization: Purdue University Engineering Computer Network Lines: 58 In article jim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) writes: > >I remember people having Corvus disk systems on their Apple II's >around 1980. But I never used them. What was the architecture? >Was the protocol file level or raw device? > Well, let's see what I can rember. We had one of these installed in high school, and I was a consultant* there too, only I worked more on the prime, but that is a different story. All of this is from memory of a user, so someone can correct my errors :-) The last time I went back and visited they had replaced it with a NOVELL (sp?) and had some macs and a couple IBM's too. The lab was installed in 1982; I graduated in 1986. * Consultant to other students, aka lab assistant during one class hour. My supervisor was the system administrator for the instructional computing facilities at the highschool. What I rember was 3 stackable boxes about 9x15" of various heights, one was the network interface (2-3" high), one was the VCR backup attachment (one board in a 1" case), and the disk itself (actually two drives, 40MB???? each?, 5-6" high). I rember the apple in the office was special, but I don't rember if it was in the datapath to the drive or not (probably not, as you could run regular applications there too). The lab consisted of 30 apple ][e's connected via 2 wires to a common bus line. Connections to the bus were made with T boxes and a 2 pin 1/8" phone plug. Each apple had a board in slot six (so you could boot from it), if you used ctl-reset you could abort the network boot. There was user login (with password) and you were given one or more pseudo-floppy disk volumes which booted a slightly different apple dos. Actually, you had drives one and two on slot six and volumes 1-255, so you play games. Each apple also had a local floppy drive installed in slot four for user access and program storage. There was also support for apple pascal, you could boot and run it off the network, including accessing multiple volumes (this is where I took my first stab at pascal....) It took some time to get reliable VCR backups, which took about 45 min to record and another 45 to verify (we found that the early ones with random VCRs were not doing any good, and bought a VCR for our sole use). Probably the thing I rember most is patching basic software to support the multiple volumes so the program and data would be on the shared read-only disk, but the data would be written on the disk in drive 4). The other thing I rember doing is going around and booting some wordprocessor at every station from two floppies :-) (yes, we were licsensed for multiple copies). Well, this is what I rember from a user's perspective. If you have specific questions, I try and rember, but no promises. milton