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 t ...
. 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 and was used extensively throughout Xerox until being replaced by
Suns 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 a ...
development environment for general use stifled any third-party development.
A fully configured 6085 came with an 80MB
hard disk, 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 5ΒΌ-inch
floppy disk 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 1 ...
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 80188 ...
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, they ...
.
References
External links
OLD-COMPUTERS.COM: Museum: Xerox 6085
{{Xerox
Daybreak
Computer workstations
Products introduced in 1985