Huxley
Well-known member
My wife and I were out running some errands yesterday and on a whim we stopped into an awesome local secondhand / junk store. We had a nice time poking around and looking at tons of interesting items, and then I spotted something that made my brain twitch: a Mac-like device, but shorter and wider than a Mac...
It turned out to be a Dynalogic Hyperion, a rare Canadian computer that was the first portable IBM compatible machine (a title usually given to the much more successful Compaq Portable). There were compatibility limitations between the Hyperion and the IBM and the Hyperion's floppy drives were apparently very unreliable, so the machine had a very short lifespan before fading into obscurity.
I haven't been able to totally confirm this yet, but a comment on Facebook indicates that the Hyperion's outer case and overall industrial design was created by Dr. Bill Dresselhaus... the same designer who oversaw the industrial design of the Apple Lisa, which itself inspired the first-generation Macintosh.
The shopkeeper let me know that this Hyperion doesn't turn on, so I'll have my work cut out for me to get it running again. Nevertheless, I'm delighted to have such a weird, rare machine in my collection, and I think it's going to make a fascinating display alongside my Macintosh 128k - two very different machines with some shared design DNA!
Huxely
It turned out to be a Dynalogic Hyperion, a rare Canadian computer that was the first portable IBM compatible machine (a title usually given to the much more successful Compaq Portable). There were compatibility limitations between the Hyperion and the IBM and the Hyperion's floppy drives were apparently very unreliable, so the machine had a very short lifespan before fading into obscurity.
I haven't been able to totally confirm this yet, but a comment on Facebook indicates that the Hyperion's outer case and overall industrial design was created by Dr. Bill Dresselhaus... the same designer who oversaw the industrial design of the Apple Lisa, which itself inspired the first-generation Macintosh.
The shopkeeper let me know that this Hyperion doesn't turn on, so I'll have my work cut out for me to get it running again. Nevertheless, I'm delighted to have such a weird, rare machine in my collection, and I think it's going to make a fascinating display alongside my Macintosh 128k - two very different machines with some shared design DNA!
Huxely