13 Nov
2005
13 Nov
'05
1:51 p.m.
On 11/13/2005 at 7:07 PM Pierre Gebhardt wrote:
as far as I know, Onyx delivered the first
microcomputer ever in
combination with a Unix called ONIX.
The name of the system was C8000 or C8002, don't remember well.
I own such a box but the documentation is missing.
Maybe somebody else could explain, why they went out of business quite
qickly.
What I've been knowing so far is that documents are near to non-existing.
:-(
We had an Onyx system in the lab, but it's hard to remember much about it.
Z8000-type machine, I believe. Used a DC-300 (600?) style tape for backup.
Corportate headquarters were on North First Street near Trimble Road in
San Jose, IIRC.
Onyx went downhill pretty fast after they acquired IMI and changed their
name to Onyx+IMI. IMI was an early hard disk manufacturer. Maybe someone
remembers their black plastic shoebox-sized drive that worked as an Apple
][ add-on (maybe an ad in Byte around 1980 would show a good picture of
it). IIRC, it was mapped to something like 50 floppies to the Apple.
What was unusual to me was the use of a closed-loop servo positioner rather
than the more common stepper. One rather interesting thing was that it
wouldn't operate very well if it was too far off the horizontal.
Cheers,
Chuck