Xerox Daybreak


Xerox Daybreak is a workstation computer marketed by Xerox from 1985 to 1989.

Overview

The Daybreak runs the ViewPoint GUI and was used extensively throughout Xerox until being replaced by Suns and PCs. Although being years ahead of its time, it was never a major commercial success. The proprietary closed architecture and Xerox's reluctance to release the Mesa development environment for general use stifled any third-party development.
A fully configured 6085 comes with an 80MB hard disk, 3.7MB of RAM, a 5¼-inch floppy disk drive, an Ethernet controller, and a PC emulator card containing an 80186 CPU. The basic system comes with 1.1MB of RAM and a 10MB hard disk. It was introduced in 1985 at.
Daybreak is the final release in the D* series of machines, some of which share the Wildflower instruction set architecture, designed by Butler Lampson. Machines in this series include, in order, Dolphin, Dorado, Dicentra, Dandelion, Dandetiger, Daybreak, the never-manufactured Daisy, and "a multiprocessor system used in a high-end printing system".
The Daybreak was sold as a Xerox 1186 workstation when configured as a Lisp machine. It was sold as the Xerox 6085 PCS 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.