The Onyx box
redated all the 68K and later Intel or other systems. John
Bass brought one to USENIX to demo in early 1980 ru a V7 port
and everyone was blown away. Playing with it. It was a desktop
(19" rack) system that worked like a PDP-11. I don't
remember the bus, but I would guess it was either custom or
Multibus-I.
Besides being
one of the first non-PDP-11 'ports', the original lockf(2)
system call was defined for the database that they had built.
John would release the specs to /usr/group later. I remember
at one meeting in the early 1980s discussing if file locking
needed to be in the original specification (Heinz probably
remembers also as the chair of that meeting). I'm not at
home, so I don't have the document to see if it was picked
up. The argument was that serious computers like VMS or the
like ran real databases and without file locking UNIX would
never be considered a real OS that people could use.
BTW: Joy would
later use Bass's call as a model for the 4.2 call, but Joy
made the locks advisory, Bass's version was full / mandatory
locks.
FWIW: I think a
search will pick up a number of other Z8000 based systems, but
Onyx was the first UNIX box.