The Xerox 6085 was the successor of the revolutionary Xerox Star, first commercial computer to use a graphical user interface (GUI) with the familiar desktop, icons and a mouse.
The 6085 series was offered in models for network, remote (linked by Ethernet) and stand alone operation. The main unit was founded upon Xerox's Mesa 8 MHz processor which had 256 auxiliary registers and executed 48-bit-wide instructions. It also used an 80186 as an auxiliary processor.
The basic system came with 1.1 MB of memory, expandable up to 3.7 MB, a 10 to 80 MB hard disk drive, two serial ports and a 15-inch high-resolution monochrome display. An optional card allowed the 6085 to run MS-DOS software.
The operating system and GUI interface was called ViewPoint. It also came from the Star. It was written in a language developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970's and also called Mesa. This strongly-typed and structured high-level language, would have a large influence on future well known languages like Pascal or C.
Two improved versions were launched afterwards, the 6085-II with an almost twice as fast processor, and the XPIW (Xerox Publishing Illustrator's Workstation), basically a 6085 workstation with a scanner.
Sadly, like the Alto, the 6085 didn't meet a large success in spite of numerous vanguard concepts, mainly because the Xerox marketing policy was, at the time, above all directed towards copiers rather than computers.
_______________________
David Lowy was part of the field technical and marketing support team:
There were four peripherals available for the 6085. A Tape Drive for backup (using a cartridge). A Xerox 4045 Laser Printer/Copier (When sold together, it was called a Documenter). A Xerox 7650 flatbed scanner. And lastly a PC Option card that added a 386 class processor along with MS DOS to enable running MS-DOS applications.
About the sound capabilities, Edward T. Weeden specifies:
I was part of the original team working on the release of the Xerox 6085 PCS (Professional Computer System). I was scanning your description of it and noted that you do not know if it was sound-capable. It was. As a matter of fact, I programmed many tunes and sounds for it in the Xerox proprietary programming language called CUSP. This thing would play sound in sequence. For example, if you were doing something which took up buffer/time, you could click on the bell icon on your desktop and the bell sound (whatever tune you had in the icon properties) would sound in sequence, after the other stuff was done!...
|
