Corvus (company)

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Corvus Systems was a technology company founded by Michael D'Addio and Mark Hahn in 1979 and located in San Jose, Silicon Valley in the U.S.. Corvus was a pioneer when personal computers (PCs) were still considered home computers. Corvus pioneered taking PCs seriously by providing the first harddisk drives, data backup, and networking.

The combination of disk storage, backup, and networking was very popular with primary and secondary education. A classroom would have a single drive and backup with a full classroom of Apple II computers networked together. Students would log in each time they used the computer and accessed their work.

Corvus went public in 1981 and was a moderate success in the stock market. In 1983 Corvus filed for Chapter 11 and "crashed". Its demise was partially caused by the lack of appreciation for standards such as Ethernet, and partially by mismanagement such as purchasing a PC clone company when there were too many clones being made and very few clone companies making money.

1 Innovations

[edit] Innovations

[edit] Disk Drives and Backup

The company hacked the Apple II OS to enable that home computer to use 5 MB or 10 MB harddisk drives and thus be used in small businesses. The Apple II normally was limited to the usage of 90 KB floppy disks. A typical usage was for storing large mailing lists that couldn't fit on a floppy disk. Many disk drives were initially sold to software engineers inside Apple Computer.

The drives were made by IMI and Corvus provided the hardware and software to interface them to Apple IIs, Tandy TRS 80s, and S-100 bus systems. Later IBM PCs and Macs were added to the list. These 5 MB and 10 MB drives were twice the size of a shoebox, were roughly as loud as a jet taking off, and cost $4000 and $5000. Corvus sold the drives as fast as they could be made. No other company sold hard-drives for PCs for two or three years.

The drives offered a tape backup option using a VCR, which was a relatively new technology. Data was backed up at roughly one megabyte per minute which resulted in five or ten minute backup times. Even though Corvus had a patent on this technology, several other computer companies later used this technique.

[edit] Networking

In 1980 Corvus came out with the first commercially successful local area network (LAN) called Omninet. Ethernet at that time ran at four megabits/sec and cost one or two thousand dollars per computer. Ethernet also used a thick and heavy cable that felt like a lead pipe when you tried to bend it. The Ethernet cable ran around the ceiling and there was a junction box above each computer with a flat cable running down the wall to the computer.

Corvus's Omninet ran at one megabit/sec, used twisted pair cables and had a simple add-in card for each computer. The card cost $400 and could be installed by the end user. At the time, many networking experts said that twisted pair could never work because "the bits would leak off". Twisted-pair is now the networking standard for most LANs.

[edit] Corvus Concept

Corvus also developed a Macintosh competitor called the Corvus Concept. This was the first pizza-box computer with a separate monitor and the Concept had the first monitor that could be rotated between landscape and portrait modes. The failure of the Concept was mostly related to the appearance of the IBM PC which was announced a month after the Concept was announced. Unix was later ported to the Concept at which point it was quite similar to the first Sun computer (developed later).