Corvus Advert - May 1982

The Corvus Omninet was an early Local Area Network (LAN) system which used twisted pair cables, rather than the earlier and more expensive coaxial. It used the RS-422 standard and supported data transfer at 1mbps, which could operate at up to 4,000 metres.

Unlike the ethernet standard, which would eventually come to dominate LAN systems, it was only open at the lower four layers of the standard OSI "Seven Layer Model", which were essentially the physical layers. It was properietary on the remaining three layers, and so suffered from vendor lock-in.

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine installed a small seven-node Omninet system - at a cost of $12,000, or about £31,700 in 2024 - as a test in May 1983, and published a paper with the results of using it for a year.

The conclusion noted how LAN systems would eventually lead to the death of multi-user systems for most situations when it stated:

"While an IBM-PC has less computing power than a traditional mini-computer, the very nature of the LAN provides an appearance of a multi-user environment. Also, as more persons sign on to the network, there is no degradation of response, as each workstation remains an independent unit. Actual delays as a result of contention for the network line are few as long read or write procedures are note a common event".

Author of the paper, R.S. Johanes MD concluded:

"The greatest drawback we see in Omninet is its closed architecture at the top ISO levels. This does lock the network user into Corvus Industries as the sole support for the network. To date, this has not proven a problem for us nor for the other Omninet users in the Hopkins environment. However, ability to access certain network resources, such as who is logged on at any time, is not available directly nor are sufficiently detailed manuals available to allow users to develop such low level support software. Omninet provides a reliable and inexpensive offering into small micro- computer based LAN's in the 16 bit marketplace. While not a open system, this drawback may be more of an issue in the 32 bit super-micro LAN's than it is in the 16 bit micro world^[1]."