Date   : Tue, 13 Nov 1990 21:01:41 GMT
From   : swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!noose.ecn.purdue.edu!en.ecn.purdue.edu!milton@ucsd.edu (Milton D Miller)
Subject: Early microcomputer networks

In article <JIM.90Nov12221608@baroque.Stanford.EDU> 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