Corvus Systems

~ the last words ~

The first issue of COMPUTE!, dated the autumn of 1979, reviewed a box you could bolt to an Apple II that held 9.6 megabytes, which the reviewer worked out was the equivalent of 82 floppy disks, and which he guessed was more than ten times faster than the drive Apple sold. It cost $5,300. The mechanism inside was bought in from a Cupertino firm called IMI; what Corvus Systems supplied was the part that mattered, a rewrite of Apple DOS so that a machine with no concept of a device that large could be persuaded to use one.

The company kept that shape for eleven years. Michael D'Addio and Mark Hahn founded it in San Jose in 1979 and it grew fast enough to get a street named after itself: the later letterhead reads 2100 Corvus Drive. Sales went from $2.2 million in the fiscal year to May 1980 to $49.7 million three years later, it listed on NASDAQ in 1981 as CRVS, and by March 1984 it was telling the trade press it had more than 13,200 networks and 105,000 nodes installed and was the largest local area network company in the world.

The first half of fiscal 1984 is where the graph breaks. Sales kept climbing, to $27.3 million in six months, and alongside them the company booked its first loss.

~ the record ~

~ wired like a hi-fi speaker ~

Omninet shipped in 1981 and the pitch was cheapness rather than speed. It ran at 1 megabit per second over RS-422 twisted pair, took 64 devices, stretched 4,000 feet, and used collision avoidance with no master controller anywhere on the wire. Every device carried a card called a Transporter, which was a small computer in its own right, a Motorola 6801 with two kilobytes of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM plus a custom Corvus gate array to handle the direct memory access, all of it there so that an Apple II running at one megahertz could sit on a megabit network without drowning. The card cost $495. Corvus's own manual made the real selling point plainly: installing one was a job for a nontechnical person with a few simple tools, about as hard as hooking up a hi-fi speaker.

The first local network I ever sat on belonged to an Ankara internet cafe around 2002, twenty-odd machines on twisted pair so that a room full of teenagers could play Counter-Strike against each other. Nobody in that room thought of it as a local area network; it was just how the cafe was wired. That unremarkableness is the thing Corvus spent the early eighties trying to sell, and the reason the fuss is now invisible is that Corvus won the argument and then lost the market.

~ backup to a vcr ~

The best thing the company ever made answered a problem nobody else would touch. In 1983 an IBM PC/XT had a ten megabyte disk and no sane way to back it up, floppies meaning roughly twenty-seven diskettes fed in by hand. Corvus sold a $495 card called the Mirror that encoded the disk as a video signal and recorded it onto a domestic video cassette, through RCA phono jacks, in either VHS or Beta.

The numbers on the brochure are oddly precise for something so strange: 12,000 bytes per second, ten megabytes in fifteen minutes, and up to 91 megabytes on a single three-hour tape, which it noted was enough to hold nine complete XT drives. It carried US Patent 4,380,047 and the company claimed more than 10,000 users. Wikipedia currently puts the ceiling at 73 megabytes and the speed at about a megabyte a minute; the brochure says 91 and about two thirds of that, and the brochure is the primary document.

~ they wanted to call it the star ~

The Corvus Concept, announced in April 1982, was a 68000 workstation with a fifteen-inch display you could physically pick up and rotate ninety degrees, giving 120 characters by 56 lines lying down or 91 by 72 standing up. It took Apple peripherals and ran an operating system derived from one called Merlin. An orange phosphor tube was on the options list. Corvus is a constellation, the company already sold a star-topology product called Constellation, and the machine was going to be called the Star until somebody pointed out that Xerox had got there first. It arrived eight months after the IBM PC, proprietary and incompatible, into the one market that had just picked a standard. The best surviving evidence of how many sold is a directory Corvus published in August 1984 listing the colleges and universities that had bought one, and it names about two dozen institutions.

~ the landlord ~

After the founders went, the company bought its old disk supplier and tried to become a PC clone maker, shut its Oregon plant in 1986, lost its chief financial officer and its chief executive within two days of each other in May 1987, and that July cut 21 percent of its staff against a nine-month loss of $9.2 million. It defaulted on a promissory note held by Berg & Berg on 10 April 1988 and filed for Chapter 11 that June with $11.5 million of assets against $9.6 million of debts. Then it kept trading for two more years. Amstrad looked it over as a buyer in late 1988 and walked, though it was still buying Omninet hardware, GBP 350,000 of it under a contract reported in February 1989, to bundle with its own machines.

Carl Berg's plan was approved and took effect on 16 July 1990. That is the death this grave files, and it falls three years after the one Wikipedia gives. Corvus had been reporting quarterly earnings to the New York Times as recently as January 1989, so the widely repeated "defunct 1987" cannot be right. Berg put in $1.2 million, creditors were looking at about 25 cents in the dollar, and the shareholders were issued stock in Ceron Corp, a shell that held the right to license Corvus technology and which, the trade report noted, had still to decide the exact nature of its business.

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