Corvus Systems

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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
2 References

[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 140 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 Atari 800 (Ports 3&4), 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,^{[citation needed]} and cost $4000 and $5000. Corvus sold the drives as fast as they could be made.

Certain models of the drives offered a tape backup option called "Mirror" to make hard disk backups using a VCR, which was itself a relatively new technology. A Standalone version of "Mirror" was also made available. 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.

A later version of tape backup for the Corvus Omninet was called "The Bank" and was a standalone Omninet connected device that used custom backup tape media.

[edit] Networking

In 1980 Corvus came out with the first commercially successful local area network (LAN), called Omninet. Most Ethernet deployments of the time ran at 3 Mbit/s and cost one or two thousand dollars per computer. Ethernet also used a thick and heavy cable that felt like a lead pipe when bent, which was run in proximity to each computer, often in the ceiling plenum. A transceiver unit was spliced or tapped into the cable for each computer, with an additional AUI cable running from the transceiver to the computer itself.

Corvus's Omninet ran at one megabit/s, 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", but it eventually became the de facto standard for wired LANs.

Other Omninet devices included the "Utility Server" that was an Omninet connected device that allowed Parallel and Serial devices connected to it to be shared on an Omninet network.

[edit] Corvus Concept

In April 1982, Corvus launched a computer called the Corvus Concept.^[1] This was a pizza-box computer with a monitor mounted on its top, the first that could be rotated between landscape and portrait modes. The failure of the Concept was mostly related to the rise of the IBM PC, introduced the previous August.

Unix was later^[when?] ported to the Concept at which point it was somewhat similar to Sun's first workstation, which was launched in May 1982.

The Concept design was unique in that the entire motherboard could slide out of the back of the cabinet for easy upgrades, repairs and general access. The system was equipped with Apple ][ bus compatible slots for expansion cards. External 5.25" and 8" floppy disk drive peripherals were available for the Concept.

The system had a built in Omninet port on it. The system could boot from a locally connected floppy disk or Corvus Hard Drive or it could be booted over the Omninet network as well.