[3][4][5] 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.

[6][7] It included IBM terminal emulation and a COBOL compiler, with a Z8000-based CPU add-in board to follow.

Onyx licensed Unix from Western Electric and quoted four-user and eight-user licences costing $1,500 and $2,500 respectively.

Its price of US$20,000 (equivalent to $74,000 in 2023) was half the cost of any other computer capable of running Unix,[5] and included Bell Labs' recent Version 7 Unix,[10] this having been adapted for the Z8000 with a "rewritten nucleus and several new compilers", renamed ONIX, but otherwise being "exactly the same system" as the Western Electric product available for the DEC PDP-11 family.

Pricing in the United Kingdom started at around £12,000 (£58,100 adjusted for inflation) for a four-user system with 256 KB of RAM and 10 MB hard drive.

[23] Former Harvard economics professor William Raduchel recruited Scott McNealy to manage manufacturing at Onyx.

[26] Corvus discontinued US sales of the Onyx product lines in early 1986, having reportedly pledged to continue manufacturing for foreign markets,[27] eventually selling off the rights to some of its product lines and, in 1987, exiting the microcomputer business altogether.