Onyx Systems, Inc., founded in Cupertino, California in 1979 by Bob Marsh and Kip Myers, was one of the earliest vendors of microprocessor-based Unix systems.
The company's first product, the C8000, was a Zilog Z80-based micro running the CP/M OS, with a hard disk, and a tape drive for backups. It included IBM terminal emulation and a COBOL compiler, with a Z8000-based CPU add-in board to follow.
In 1980 Onyx introduced the C8002 based on the Z8000. Its $20,000 price was half the cost of any other computer capable of running the operating system, and included Bell Labs' Version 7 Unix.
The Unix-based product was the first platform for the Informix relational database system.
Former Harvard economics professor William Raduchel recruited Scott McNealy to manage manufacturing at Onyx. McNealy left Onyx to become a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
Onyx was acquired by Corvus Systems in 1985.
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