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

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, 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 syste ...

computer marketed by

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (, ) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox was the pioneer of the photocopier market, beginning with the introduc ...

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 (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 Lawrencev ...

. 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 Star 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- ...

. 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, bounded from all sides by steep escarpments and standing distinctly above a surrounding plain. Mesas consist of flat-lying soft sedimentary rocks, such as shales, capped by a ...

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

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 hard disk drive platter, pla ...

, 3.7 MB of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

, a 5¼-inch

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a 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 with a ...

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 80188 ...

CPU. The basic system comes with 1.1 MB of RAM and a 10 MB hard disk. It was introduced in 1985 at . The Daybreak was also sold as a Xerox 1186 workstation when configured as a Lisp machine. Xerox also produced the Xerox Encryption Unit, intended to "sit atop a Xerox 6085 workstation processor" but reportedly usable by workstations and personal computers in general, for the encryption of IEEE 802.3 and Ethernet local area network traffic in government computing environments.

References

External links

OLD-COMPUTERS.COM: Museum: Xerox 6085
{{Xerox Daybreak Computer workstations Products introduced in 1985 16-bit computers