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 . 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 ==