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Corvus Concept

Known Issues:
The keyboard is not emulated fully.
Hard disks, serial ports, and Omninet are not emulated.
Only the original floppy controller (8" SSSD disks) is emulated.

Usage:
The driver can boot from a 8" SSSD floppy image. Start the computer and press
'F' when the computer asks for a boot device.
You may invoke the MACSbug debugger as well by pressing the key 'D'. However,
this version of MACSbug requires a terminal to be connected to the serial port
to do anything useful, so you are out of luck.

History and Trivia:
The Concept was announced in the spring of 1982.
This computer uses a state-of-art (at the time) MC68000 CPU. Its CCOS
operating system is a variant of the Merlin operating system by Silicon Valley
Software: it is a mono-tasking OS, with source-level compatibility with the
UCSD p-system, and vague reminiscences of UNIX.
The Concept has a bitmapped screen, which enables to mix text in any style and
size with graphics, and some programs were reportedly WYSIWYG (which was still
relatively uncommon at the time). The system includes a primitive window
manager, but don't delude yourself: it is no GUI. The most original feature is
probably the rotatable screen that can be used either in horizontal or vertical
position: however you need to reboot the computer after flipping the screen.
Another feature of interest is the integrated network support: the Concept can
be used either as a disk-less network computer or as a full-featured personal
computer, and you could connect Concepts, Apple IIs and IBM PCs in an
heterogeneous Omninet LAN.
Available programs were mostly business applications: word processor,
spreadsheet, grapher, database, accounting... Thanks to its large screen, its
WYSIWYG capability and to the use of various hierarchical menus, the Concept is
relatively user-friendly for a 1982 business computer. There were also Pascal
and FORTRAN compilers, a BASIC, a UCSD runtime, an 8080 simulator, a port of
the CP/M OS, a version of SPICE to simulate discrete ICs, and even a paint
program that could take advantage of a mouse.
The price was about 4000$ for a bare 256-kbyte system in 1984 (1000$ for extra
256kbytes, $750 for floppy, from 2000$ to 4000$ for hard disk according to
size).


Generated on Mon Jun 16 18:23:37 2003