The Hyperion's Commodore Connection





One interesting historical note about the Hyperion is its use by Commodore as the basis for Commodore's first generation of PC clones. According to George Robbins, ex-Commodore engineer:

   GR> Commodore actually bought rights to the Hyperion design and there were
   GR> a couple floating around West Chester.  The design served as the basis
   GR> for the first 8088 based PC-clones that Commodore manufactured, though
   GR> they ended up in normal desktop cases.  The next generation was based
   GR> much more directly on the IBM PC's (probably for 100% compatibility)
   GR> then we started making our own customer chips/asic to get the cost down
   GR> before switching to industry standard "chipsets" for 286-486 designs.
   GR> In the end it was cheaper to just buy and resell clones from HK.
   GR>
   GR> On of my tasks at Commodore before the Amiga stuff took over was to
   GR> make a comparison of the Hyperion design and our current PC design to
   GR> "prove" that we weren't using any of the Hyperion proprietary design
   GR> features and there was no reason we should continue paying them
   GR> royalties on every PC we sold.  8-)

There is a Hyperion listed in Jim Brain's "Canonical List of Commodore Products". George Robbins says that Commodore never manufactured Hyperions, but that Commodore Canada may have made a deal with Dynalogic to sell Commodore branded Hyperions. If anyone has seen a Commodore-branded Hyperion I'd love to hear about it!


[Hrothgar's Cool Old Junk Page] 1999-08-22