Xerox Daybreak (also Xerox 6085 PCS, Xerox 1186) is a

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...

computer marketed by

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...

from 1985 to 1989.

Overview

Daybreak is the final release in the D* (pronounced D-Star) series of machines, some of which share the Wildflower CPU design by

Butler Lampson Butler W. Lampson, ForMemRS, (born December 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing. Education and early life After graduating from the ...

. Machines in this series include, in order, Dolphin, Dorado, Dicentra, Dandelion, Dandetiger, Daybreak, the never-manufactured Daisy, and Dragonfly "a 4-processor VLSI CPU developed at PARC and intended for a high-end printing system". It was sold as the Xerox 6085 PCS (Professional Computer System) or Viewpoint 6085 PCS when sold as an office workstation running the Viewpoint system. Viewpoint is based on the Star software originally developed for the

Xerox Star The Xerox Star workstation, officially named Xerox 8010 Information System, is the first commercial personal computer to incorporate technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based ...

. The 6085 ran the ViewPoint (later GlobalView)

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

and was used extensively throughout Xerox until being replaced by

Suns Suns may refer to: * Gold Coast Suns, Australian rules football team * Phoenix Suns, basketball team *The Sun, the star of the solar system * Stars, massive balls of plasma * Sun (unit), or cun, a traditional Chinese unit of length *An abbreviatio ...

and PCs. Although years ahead of its time, it was never a commercial success. The proprietary closed architecture and Xerox's reluctance to release the

Mesa A mesa is an isolated, flat-topped elevation, ridge or hill, which is bounded from all sides by steep escarpments and stands distinctly above a surrounding plain. Mesas characteristically consist of flat-lying soft sedimentary rocks capped by ...

development environment for general use stifled any third-party development. A fully configured 6085 came with an 80MB

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...

, 3.7MB of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

, a 5¼-inch

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

drive, an

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

controller, and a PC emulator card containing an

80186 The Intel 80186, also known as the iAPX 186, or just 186, is a microprocessor and microcontroller introduced in 1982. It was based on the Intel 8086 and, like it, had a 16-bit external data bus multiplexed with a 20-bit address bus. The 801 ...

CPU. The basic system comes with 1.1MB of RAM and a 10MB hard disk. It was introduced in 1985 at . The Daybreak was also sold as a Xerox 1186 workstation when configured as a

Lisp machine Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, the ...

References

External links

OLD-COMPUTERS.COM: Museum: Xerox 6085
{{Xerox Daybreak Computer workstations Products introduced in 1985