Corvus Systems Inc, San Jose, has a new generation of its Constellation networking software for the Apple II line when used in schools: designed with the input of educational experts, (now now, we all feel the same way about so-called experts but there’s no need to make faces like that), Constellation III, is structured specifically for classroom situations (gulp) and is designed to be an effective education management tool that can be easily administered by busy educators and other non-computer experts; it enables the entire family of Apple IIs up to the IIGS, to be used on a Corvus Omninet local area network, students share programs, hard disk space and printers over the network, reducing the cost for the schools and minimising floppy disk handling for the teachers (chalk dust plays merry hell with those 96 tracks per inch); Constellation III also adds a batch processing mode that lets the network manager set up an entire class in minutes and prepare planning worksheets that give teachers guidance in network organisation, it supports ProDOS, AppleDOS 3.3 and UCSD Pascal, and with other Corvus software modules, and also allows simultaneous use of CP/M, MS-DOS and Macintosh programs on the network; it requires a 128Kb Apple IIe for network management, supports up to 63 simultaneous IIs with as little as 48Kb apiece, up to 10 network hard disk drives for 1Gb total, and lists for $495.
