This San Jose, Silicon Valley company pioneered in the early days of personal computers, producing the first hard disk drives, data backup, and networking devices, commonly for the Apple II.
Students would log in each time they use the computer and access their work via the Corvus Omninet network, which also supported eMail.
The company's founders left Corvus in 1985 as the remaining board of directors made the decision to enter the PC clone market.
[citation needed] D'Addio and Hahn went on to found Videonics in 1986, the same year Corvus discontinued hardware manufacturing.
[citation needed] The disk drives were manufactured by IMI (International Memories Incorporated) in Cupertino, California.
Corvus provided the hardware and software to interface them to the Apple II, TRS-80, Atari 8-bit computers,[15] and S-100 bus systems.
This allowed sharing a then-very costly hard drive among multiple, relatively inexpensive Apple II computers.
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.
Ethernet also used a thick and heavy cable that felt like a lead pipe when bent,[citation needed] which was run in proximity to each computer, often in the ceiling plenum.
Corvus's Omninet ran at one megabit per second, used twisted pair cables and had a simple add-in card for each computer.
At the time, many networking experts said that twisted pair could never work because "the bits would leak off"[citation needed], but it eventually became the de-facto standard for wired LANs.
A dumb terminal connected to the first serial port then became an inexpensive diskless word processing station.
[20] This was a Motorola 68000-based computer in a pizza-box case with a 15" full page display mounted on its top, the first that could be rotated between landscape and portrait modes.
[21] Changing display orientation did not require rebooting the computer - it was all automatic and seamless and selected by a mercury switch inside the monitor shell.
[22][23] The first version of the Concept came with 256 kB standard,[24] and expanding the RAM to its maximum supported capacity of 1MB cost $995 at the time.
The failure of the Concept was mostly related to its lack of compatibility with the IBM PC, introduced the previous August.
[27] These could be pasted into Corvus' word processing program called "Edword", which was quite powerful by the standards of the day; it was judged to be worth the cost of the system by itself.
[28] The operating system, called CCOS, was prompt-driven, communicating with the user using full sentences such as Copy which file(s)?
[citation needed] The system had a battery-backed hardware clock that stored the date and month, but not the year.