Corvus (company)
Encyclopedia
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 of the early days of personal computer
s, producing the first hard disk
drives, data backup
, and networking devices, commonly for the Apple II
platform.
The combination of disk storage, backup, and networking was very popular in 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 use the computer and access their work.
Corvus went public
in 1981 and was traded on the NASDAQ exchange. The company was a modest success in the stock market
during its first few years as a public company. The company's founder left Corvus in 1985 as the remaining board of directors made the decision to enter the PC clone market. D'Addio and Hahn went on to found Videonics in 1986.
In 1987 the company filed for Chapter 11. Its demise was partially caused by Ethernet establishing itself over Omninet as the local area network standard for PCs, and partially by the decision to become a PC clone company in a crowded and unprofitable market space.
The Corvus supported a runtime Pascal interpreter. You can interrupt your programs, edit them, and keep running. Pascal is advanced - not just BASIC. The manuals have all the source code printed just in case you want to read up on your application to change it. Not as innovative as mainframe software - but very innovative for personal use technology at the time, usable by a computer idiot and or a programmer. (Pascal is not comparable to Lisp - but Pascal is easily understood and highly functional). The small PC market disappeared as technology was rapidly released: things were no longer small.
The Corvus has Omninet (see below), a test chip to monitor the health of the computer and display graphs so you knew your computer is healthy, a BIOS too. Also the Corvus optionally had built-in BASIC to boot without a disk attached. Being an early release of a faster Motorola chip it was far faster than the original PC.
The Corvus was HANDS DOWN a way better PC than an Intel / IBM PC and should have had that market. Unfortunately Corvus was not posed or inclined to challenge so many other companies that arrived to market: the market became very very saturated with heavy competitors, and mainframes technology was becoming released as small as PC and lowering in price.
This story isn't unique - that Corvus should have won the market but didn't sell. Many technologies of the 1980s were excellent, should have won out by virtue, but never sold enough units. Some of the most astounding technologies of computing still in wide use today couldn't sell enough units in the 80's and '90's.
DOS
to enable that home computer to use 10 MB Winchester technology hard disk drives. The Apple II normally was limited to the usage of 140 KB
floppy disks. The Corvus disks not only increased the size of available storage but were also considerably faster than floppy disks. Typical usage ranged from small business and classroom management to data analysis. As an example the hard disks would be used for storing large mailing list
s that could not fit on a floppy. Initial disk drives were sold to software engineers inside Apple Computer
.
The disk drives were manufactured by IMI (International Memories Incorporated) in Cupertino, California. Corvus provided the hardware and software to interface them to Apple II's, Tandy
TRS-80
s, and S-100 bus
systems. Later, IBM PC
s and Macs were added to the list. These 5 MB and 10 MB drives were twice the size of a shoebox and initially retailed for US$5000. Corvus sold many stand alone drives whose numbers increased as they became shared over Omninet.
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 that were very similar in shape and size to today's DLT tapes.
Both the Corvus File Server and The Bank tape backup units were in white plastic housings roughly the size of two stacked reams of paper.
(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 per second, 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. Cards and operating software were produced for both the Apple II and the IBM PC and XT. 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 one Parallel printer and two Serial devices (usually printers) connected to it to be shared on an Omninet network. Internally the Utility Server was a single-board Z80
computer with 64 kB of RAM, and on startup the internal boot ROM retrieved its operating program from the File Server. The literature/documentation and software that shipped with the Utility Server included a memory map and I/O ports writeup. Due to this, one popular hack was to replace the Utility Server's operating code file with a stand-alone copy of Wordstar configured for the serial port, and to fetch and save its files on the file server. Plug a dumb terminal into the first serial port, reboot the Utility Server and voilá!, Wordstar painted its startup screen and you had a cheap diskless word processing station.
A single Omninet was limited to 32 devices, and the device address was set with a 5-bit DIP switch. Device zero was the first file server, device one was the Mirror or The Bank tape backup, and two on up (to 31) were user computers, or Utility Servers. Systems with more than one file server had them at zero and up, then the tape backup, then the user computers. No matter what the configuration, you could only have 32 devices.
Motorola 68000
-based computer with a monitor
mounted on its top, the first that could be rotated between landscape and portrait modes. Changing modes did not require rebooting the computer - it was all automatic and seamless and selected by a mercury switch
inside the monitor shell. The first version of the Concept was limited to 1 MB of RAM, a simple hack provided 4 MB. The failure of the Concept was mostly related to the rise of the IBM PC
, introduced the previous August.
Though not a GUI
, the Concept used a standardized text user interface
that made heavy use of function keys, with the current command performed by each key displayed on a persistent status line at the bottom of the screen.
Unix
was later 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 II bus compatible slots for expansion cards. External 5.25" and 8" floppy disk drive peripherals (made by Fujitsu) 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.
San Jose, California
San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...
, Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
, in the U.S. Corvus was a pioneer of the early days of personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
s, producing the first hard disk
Hard disk
A hard disk drive is a non-volatile, random access digital magnetic data storage device. It features rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a protective enclosure. Data is magnetically read from and written to the platter by read/write heads that float on a film of air above the...
drives, data backup
Backup
In information technology, a backup or the process of backing up is making copies of data which may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form is back up in two words, whereas the noun is backup....
, and networking devices, commonly for the Apple II
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...
platform.
The combination of disk storage, backup, and networking was very popular in primary
Primary education
A primary school is an institution in which children receive the first stage of compulsory education known as primary or elementary education. Primary school is the preferred term in the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth Nations, and in most publications of the United Nations Educational,...
and secondary education
Secondary education
Secondary education is the stage of education following primary education. Secondary education includes the final stage of compulsory education and in many countries it is entirely compulsory. The next stage of education is usually college or university...
. A classroom would have a single drive and backup with a full classroom of Apple II
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...
computers networked together. Students would log in each time they use the computer and access their work.
Corvus went public
Public company
This is not the same as a Government-owned corporation.A public company or publicly traded company is a limited liability company that offers its securities for sale to the general public, typically through a stock exchange, or through market makers operating in over the counter markets...
in 1981 and was traded on the NASDAQ exchange. The company was a modest success in the stock market
Stock market
A stock market or equity market is a public entity for the trading of company stock and derivatives at an agreed price; these are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately.The size of the world stock market was estimated at about $36.6 trillion...
during its first few years as a public company. The company's founder left Corvus in 1985 as the remaining board of directors made the decision to enter the PC clone market. D'Addio and Hahn went on to found Videonics in 1986.
In 1987 the company filed for Chapter 11. Its demise was partially caused by Ethernet establishing itself over Omninet as the local area network standard for PCs, and partially by the decision to become a PC clone company in a crowded and unprofitable market space.
Innovations
The Corvus is one of many Motorola based personal computers (inexpensive enough for personal use). It was marketed for Government and Business use. Good applications and even internet in a 1982 personal computer with great graphics and a fast processor. In 1982 it was ahead of the IBM PC, in that market, but also more expensive. (absolutely it was not marketed for schools only - that's more like Apple).The Concept
The Corvus supports making documents with intermixed pictures and text: which was very well presented for a 1982 PC. It also has other application accessed by function keys. Business and pleasure software, mostly practical software applications. (see image link's of Corvus's Desktop - competing computers had only simple text and no desktop arrangement).The Corvus supported a runtime Pascal interpreter. You can interrupt your programs, edit them, and keep running. Pascal is advanced - not just BASIC. The manuals have all the source code printed just in case you want to read up on your application to change it. Not as innovative as mainframe software - but very innovative for personal use technology at the time, usable by a computer idiot and or a programmer. (Pascal is not comparable to Lisp - but Pascal is easily understood and highly functional). The small PC market disappeared as technology was rapidly released: things were no longer small.
The Corvus has Omninet (see below), a test chip to monitor the health of the computer and display graphs so you knew your computer is healthy, a BIOS too. Also the Corvus optionally had built-in BASIC to boot without a disk attached. Being an early release of a faster Motorola chip it was far faster than the original PC.
The Corvus was HANDS DOWN a way better PC than an Intel / IBM PC and should have had that market. Unfortunately Corvus was not posed or inclined to challenge so many other companies that arrived to market: the market became very very saturated with heavy competitors, and mainframes technology was becoming released as small as PC and lowering in price.
This story isn't unique - that Corvus should have won the market but didn't sell. Many technologies of the 1980s were excellent, should have won out by virtue, but never sold enough units. Some of the most astounding technologies of computing still in wide use today couldn't sell enough units in the 80's and '90's.
Graphics
The Corvus has Mono Video Graphics Array and a large 8½" × 11" monitor that was very advanced: the video card was integrated in the monitor's update circuitry. Very "high res" for the day too. Reading text on that monitor was gem for those days (bright white with a hint of blue, clear, not blinky like the IBM) due to those advanced refresh technologies which the PC didn't match in full for several years. It was fast for the time. Having the video card circuit built right into the monitor circuit also came from the mainframe world.Disk drives and backup
The company hacked the Apple IIApple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...
DOS
DOS
DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...
to enable that home computer to use 10 MB Winchester technology hard disk drives. The Apple II normally was limited to the usage of 140 KB
Kilobyte
The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...
floppy disks. The Corvus disks not only increased the size of available storage but were also considerably faster than floppy disks. Typical usage ranged from small business and classroom management to data analysis. As an example the hard disks would be used for storing large mailing list
Mailing list
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the...
s that could not fit on a floppy. Initial disk drives were sold to software engineers inside Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
.
The disk drives were manufactured by IMI (International Memories Incorporated) in Cupertino, California. Corvus provided the hardware and software to interface them to Apple II's, Tandy
Tandy Corporation
Tandy Corporation was a family-owned leather goods company based in Fort Worth, Texas. Tandy was founded in 1919 as a leather supply store, and acquired RadioShack in 1963. The Tandy name was dropped in May 2000, when RadioShack Corporation was made the official name.-History:Tandy began in 1919...
TRS-80
TRS-80
TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation's desktop microcomputer model line, sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first units, ordered unseen, were delivered in November 1977, and rolled out to the stores the third week of December. The line won popularity with...
s, and S-100 bus
S-100 bus
The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE696-1983 , was an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800, generally considered today to be the first personal computer...
systems. Later, IBM PC
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
s and Macs were added to the list. These 5 MB and 10 MB drives were twice the size of a shoebox and initially retailed for US$5000. Corvus sold many stand alone drives whose numbers increased as they became shared over Omninet.
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
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
per minute which resulted in five or ten minute backup times. Even though Corvus had a patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
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 that were very similar in shape and size to today's DLT tapes.
Both the Corvus File Server and The Bank tape backup units were in white plastic housings roughly the size of two stacked reams of paper.
Networking
In 1980 Corvus came out with the first commercially successful local area networkLocal area network
A local area network is a computer network that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building...
(LAN), called Omninet. Most Ethernet
Ethernet
Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....
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
10BASE5
10BASE5 was the original commercially available variant of Ethernet.For its physical layer it used cable similar to RG-8/U coaxial cable but with extra braided shielding. This is a stiff, diameter cable with an impedance of 50 ohms , a solid center conductor, a foam insulating filler, a shielding...
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
Attachment Unit Interface
An Attachment Unit Interface is a 15 pin connection that provides a path between a node's Ethernet interface and the Medium Attachment Unit , sometimes known as a transceiver. It is the part of the IEEE Ethernet standard located between the Media Access Control , and the MAU...
cable running from the transceiver to the computer itself.
Corvus's Omninet ran at one megabit per second, used twisted pair
Twisted pair
Twisted pair cabling is a type of wiring in which two conductors are twisted together for the purposes of canceling out electromagnetic interference from external sources; for instance, electromagnetic radiation from unshielded twisted pair cables, and crosstalk between neighboring pairs...
cables and had a simple add-in card
Expansion card
The expansion card in computing is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an expansion slot of a computer motherboard or backplane to add functionality to a computer system via the expansion bus.One edge of the expansion card holds the contacts that fit exactly into the slot...
for each computer. The card cost $400 and could be installed by the end user. Cards and operating software were produced for both the Apple II and the IBM PC and XT. 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 one Parallel printer and two Serial devices (usually printers) connected to it to be shared on an Omninet network. Internally the Utility Server was a single-board Z80
Zilog Z80
The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by Zilog and sold from July 1976 onwards. It was widely used both in desktop and embedded computer designs as well as for military purposes...
computer with 64 kB of RAM, and on startup the internal boot ROM retrieved its operating program from the File Server. The literature/documentation and software that shipped with the Utility Server included a memory map and I/O ports writeup. Due to this, one popular hack was to replace the Utility Server's operating code file with a stand-alone copy of Wordstar configured for the serial port, and to fetch and save its files on the file server. Plug a dumb terminal into the first serial port, reboot the Utility Server and voilá!, Wordstar painted its startup screen and you had a cheap diskless word processing station.
A single Omninet was limited to 32 devices, and the device address was set with a 5-bit DIP switch. Device zero was the first file server, device one was the Mirror or The Bank tape backup, and two on up (to 31) were user computers, or Utility Servers. Systems with more than one file server had them at zero and up, then the tape backup, then the user computers. No matter what the configuration, you could only have 32 devices.
Corvus Concept
In April 1982, Corvus launched a computer called the Corvus Concept. This was a pizza-boxPizza box form factor
In computing, a pizza box is a style of case for computers or network switches. Cases of this type tend to be wide and flat, normally one or two rack units in height, thus resembling pizza delivery boxes....
Motorola 68000
Motorola 68000
The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor...
-based computer with a monitor
Computer display
A monitor or display is an electronic visual display for computers. The monitor comprises the display device, circuitry, and an enclosure...
mounted on its top, the first that could be rotated between landscape and portrait modes. Changing modes did not require rebooting the computer - it was all automatic and seamless and selected by a mercury switch
Mercury switch
A mercury switch is a switch whose purpose is to allow or interrupt the flow of electric current in an electrical circuit in a manner that is dependent on the switch's physical position or alignment relative to the direction of the "pull" of earth's gravity, or other inertia.Mercury switches...
inside the monitor shell. The first version of the Concept was limited to 1 MB of RAM, a simple hack provided 4 MB. The failure of the Concept was mostly related to the rise of the IBM PC
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
, introduced the previous August.
Though not a GUI
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
, the Concept used a standardized text user interface
Text user interface
TUI short for: Text User Interface or Textual User Interface , is a retronym that was coined sometime after the invention of graphical user interfaces, to distinguish them from text-based user interfaces...
that made heavy use of function keys, with the current command performed by each key displayed on a persistent status line at the bottom of the screen.
Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
was later ported to the Concept at which point it was somewhat similar to Sun
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
's first workstation
Sun-1
Sun-1 was the first generation of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in May 1982. These were based on a CPU board designed by Andy Bechtolsheim while he was a graduate student at Stanford University and funded by DARPA...
, 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 II bus compatible slots for expansion cards. External 5.25" and 8" floppy disk drive peripherals (made by Fujitsu) 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.