Xerox Daybreak
workstation computer
Xerox Daybreak (also Xerox 6085 PCS, Xerox 1186) is a workstation computer marketed by Xerox 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. 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 6085 ran the ViewPoint (later GlobalView) GUI and was used extensively throughout Xerox until being replaced by Sun workstations 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 development environment for general use stifled any third-party development.
A fully configured 6085 came with an 80 MB hard disk, 3.7 MB of RAM, a 5¼-inch floppy disk drive, an Ethernet controller, and a PC emulator card containing an 80186 CPU. The basic system came with 1.1 MB of RAM and a 10 MB hard disk. It was introduced in 1985 at US$4,995 (equivalent to $15,000 in 2025).
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8043909. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1186, 1985, 1989 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Xerox Daybreak” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.