>Lo, many years ago, we had an Onyx Z8002 system running Onix in the
>basement of Evans Hall at UCB.

>It was really nice.

Gag. I used an Onyx in New Zealand. A 7th. Ed/heading-toward-System-III
box, with the C compiler still in transition from '=+'  to '+='.
If memory serves, it had `more' processing in the tty driver/line discipline.

Consequently, having a program die, leaving the tty state confused
and/or different than the shell expected, was just hideous.

Are we talking about different things?  For the time, the performance
was great, but I'd hardly call it `really nice'.  Unless you had
*lots* of local changes.