General Category > LisaList2
Corvus HDDs and the Lisa
stepleton:
Great find! There seem to be lots of close analogues between these pins and what the ProFile uses, and so using a Corvus drive from a Lisa parallel port seems tractable to me.
* DIRC: seems like ProFile PR/~W, but the drive sets it
* READY: seems a lot like ~PBSY
* STROBE: seems like a combination of ~PSTRB and ~PCMD
I don't see a parity line like the ProFile uses, and one thing I might be curious to find out later is why the drive is the one that controls ~RESET, not the computer (cf. ~PRESET on the ProFile).
Either way, at a glance it looks like you could probably bash together some software to repurpose my device into "Cameo/Cepheid" I guess (Corvus Parallel Hard Drive, compare Apple Parallel Hard Drive) without very much trouble.
rayarachelian:
Here's the corvus driver for uniplus, it does look like it attaches to the parallel port, there's references to CA2, port a, port b, and it even includes profile structures.
https://github.com/arcanebyte/uniplus/blob/master/v1.5/sys/cv.c
rayarachelian:
So there seem to be a couple of these on ebay, here's a 20MB one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-CORVUS-SYSTEMS-20-Mb-HARD-DRIVE/332876241872
Both seem to have a VCR interface with a remote, presumably for backups? As well as a connection to a processor and another drive. Not sure if they could be chained together or if they were used on some kind of LAN server.
Not sure if these are the same ones for the Lisa.
blusnowkitty:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/corvus/service/
So it looks like those particular drives also came in a 6MB variant too. The manuals seem to imply that the video ports could be used to get into some kind of low-level OS with the drive, but their primary purpose (and the VCR REMOTE port) was indeed for making a tape backup of your hard drive (to VHS, Beta, and Technicolour 212!) with the Corvus Mirror. Neat! It seems these things were used a lot with the Atari 800 from a little bit of quick research.
compu_85:
Yup, they back up to video tape.
They also had a system where you could network the drive and share it among several Apple II's.
Processor goes to the computer, drive is for hooking up a 2nd disk I believe. There are switches hidden under the front panel for setting up / formatting the drive.
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