Physics:hal (07/20/82)
I ordered a Corvus Concept at the beginning of July although I
haven't received it yet (delivery is supposed to be the end of July).
I did get to see it at the dealer's however, so here are a few observations:
1. The system comes with a 68000 Operating system, a 68000 assembler,
and a native code Pascal compiler. ANSI 77 FORTRAN, Edword word
processor, or Logicalc electronic spreadsheet are extra cost.
2. The source language for the Pascal compiler appears to be UCSD Pascal.
The brochure lists it as "ISO Pascal with UCSD extensions".
Also, 'Logicalc' is a trademark of (I forget who) and is a UCSD program.
'Corvus Logicalc' is a trademark of the 68000 code version.
3. The operating system uses UCSD file structures, a tree structured
directory, and the shell is very similar to the UNIX shell.
4. You can define a window anywhere on the screen and this may overlap
previosly defined windows. We didn't play with this too much.
Actually, the dealer had only had the system for a few days and he
hadn't had a chance to play with it much either.
5. When we arrived at the dealer's, the Concept was running a program
which was drawing a perspective plot of a sinc function of revolution.
It looked quite nice but the plotting speed was rather slow. I don't
know anything about what language the program as written in and what
affect this might have had on the speed. The display is 560x720.
6. The display is a 15" diag., 35MHz, white phosphor monitor. The monitor
is memory mapped and uses DMA. All characters are software generated
and you can define your own. The display can be used in either a
horizontal (56lines x 120chars/line) or vertical (72x90) orientation.
This requires rebooting the operating system however.
7. The keyboard is also memory mapped. It generates an interrupt whenever
a key is pressed or released.
8. The keyboard, monitor, and drivers take about 55Kbyte.
9. Presently you can get either a 256Kb or 512Kb memory system. Corvus is
working on a larger memory board for it though (at least 1Mbyte). The
system does not use a mother board. The extra 256Kb memory card connects
via a ribbon cable.
10. The four expansion slots take Apple peripheral controllers!
11. I'll let you know more once I get a chance to play with mine.
Hal Chambers
pur-ee!pur-phy!hal