DigiBarn Systems: Xerox 860

Xerox 860 IPS

The Xerox 860 was the Cadillac, no, the Rolls-Royce of word processing systems, used by secretaries (remember those?) in high end corporations and other prestigious institutions. I remember seeing the 860 in action while I was a student at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications. It sure went along with the department's leather couches and in-office kitchennettes! Amazingly the 860 was based on CP/M, supported WYSIWYG word processing, printing on a Diablo daisy wheel printer, and had an Ethernet connection. The 860 was a very expensive system at around US $14,000 and for some reason was very popular in Canada. Thank you David Linder of Vancouver, Canada for the generous contribution of this system!

From Dave Curbow's Digibarn pages on the 860:

Most people don't know about the Xerox 860 Information Processing System. Here's a bit of info.

The 860 IPS (and the slightly less capable 850) was the top-end word processor in the industry, displayed with pride at the head offices of all the big corporations. Many corporate documentation departments depended on this system to produce technical documentation. It's documents could automatically contain line numbers, table of contents, footnotes and outlines. It had a spell check function with 88,000 words in its dictionary!

The full-text monitor could display 70 lines of 102 characters.

It stored working files on one of the two 8" (600 kb) floppy disks. Each disk catalog could store up to 560 documents. (In contrast, the Xerox Star came standard with a 10MB or 29MB Shugart hard drive -- but the 860 was an earlier generation.)

The system was sold with a Diablo printer, which was bidirectional and could print 40 characters per second. Up to three Xerox 860 could share one Diablo printer. The printer spooler could store up to 20 documents waiting to be printed. Later versions could make use of the network created for the Xerox Star system. So, documents could be emailed. The photo below comes from a 1982 Xerox marketing brochure.

Look carefully at the right side of the keyboard. That round circle is a CAT -- a touch sensitive pad that worked like a mouse.

From Old-computers.com's page on the Xerox 860:

The full-text monitor could display 70 lines of 102 characters. The text could be black on a white background, or the inverse.

The Xerox 860 was equipped with one of the first WYSIWYG word processors: BravoX (later called "Xerox Document System Editor") which was originally developed for the 1972 Xerox Alto and became the predecessor of virtually all modern word processors

Movie of the Xerox 860 in action with David Linder
(recorded by Bruce Damer)

The Xerox 860 (Quicktime - streaming)

The Xerox 860 (Windows Media
(198MB download)

Still images of the 860 in operation, inside and out

860 with the lights down showing complete unit and printer	DSC01283.JPG	Detail of screen, document composition
File management interface	DSC01286.JPG	DSC01287.JPG
DSC01288.JPG	DSC01289.JPG	DSC01291.JPG
Donor David Linder in the dark	DSC01293.JPG	David Linder in the light
DSC01296.JPG	DSC01300.JPG	860 printer working
Seriously thick cabling	DSC01303.JPG	DSC01306.JPG
DSC01307.JPG	860 printer	The unique 860 keyboard with CAT
DSC01310.JPG	DSC01311.JPG	DSC01312.JPG
DSC01313.JPG	The 860 opened up	DSC01315.JPG
DSC01316.JPG	Serious connectors	DSC01318.JPG
DSC01319.JPG	DSC01320.JPG	Front LED status panel
DSC01323.JPG	DSC01326.JPG	DSC01329.JPG
Daisywheels from printer	DSC01332.JPG	Getting set to go to a new home

Getting the 860 ready to roll and David and family and other collectibles

David helping with the load-in	Fits just fine!	Bruce and Galen's Tiger motorhome
David's old radio	... and his original Sony videotape system	...and his first run CD system
	The Linders