Xerox Daybreak

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Xerox Daybreak (a.k.a. Xerox 6085, Xerox 1186) is a workstation computer marketed by Xerox from 1985 to 1989. It ran the ViewPoint (later GlobalView) GUI and was used extensively throughout Xerox until being replaced by Suns and PCs. Despite 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 stifling any 3rd party development.

A fully-configured 6085 came with an 80Mb hard disk, 3.7Mb of RAM, a 5ΒΌ-inch floppy disk drive, an Ethernet controller, and a PC emulator card containing an 80186 CPU. The basic system came with 1.1Mb of RAM and a 10Mb hard disk.

The Daybreak was the last in a series of machines (known as the "D-machines") which shared an instruction set architecture. In addition to the Daybreak, machines in this series included the Dorado, Dolphin, Dandelion, and Dandetiger. The "Wildflower" machines employed a processor architecture implementing this designed by Butler Lampson and known itself as Wildflower.

The Daybreak was sold as a Xerox 1186 workstation when configured as a Lisp machine and as the Xerox 6085 when sold as an office workstation running the Viewpoint system (based on the software originally developed for the Xerox Star.)

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