|
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 computers, producing the first hard disk drives, data backup, and networking devices, commonly for the Apple II series. 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. ==Disk drives and backup== The company hacked the Apple II DOS to enable that home computer to use 10 MB Winchester technology hard disk drives. Apple DOS 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 lists 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-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 and initially retailed for US$5000. Corvus sold many stand alone drives whose numbers increased as they became shared over Omninet. Corvus brought Omninet (see "Networking" below) to this product, allowing a then-very costly hard drive to be shared among multiple inexpensive Apple II computers. An entire office or classroom could thus share a single Omninet-connected Corvus drive. 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. Tapes could hold up to 73MB. 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Corvus Systems」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|