Corvus Systems

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 United States. 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 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 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.

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