The Hyperion vied with the Compaq Portable to be the first portable IBM PC compatible computer. The Compaq Portable was the first product in the Compaq portable series to be commercially available under the Compaq Computer Corporation brand. IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. It was marketed by Infotech Cie of Ottawa, a subsidiary of Bytec Management Corp. Ottawa (ˈɒtəwə or sometimes /ˈɒtəwɑː/ is the Capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. , who acquired the designer and manufacturer Dynalogic in January 1983. The Hyperion was shipped in January 1983 at C$4995, two months ahead of the Compaq Portable. The machine had many features for 1982, including 256 kB RAM, dual 360 kB 5. 25" floppy disk drives, a graphics card compatible with both CGA and HGC, a video-out jack, a built-in 7-inch amber CRT, 300 bit/s modem, and even an acoustic coupler. A floppy disk is an increasingly Obsolete data storage medium that is composed of a disk of thin flexible ("floppy" Magnetic storage medium encased The Color Graphics Adapter ( CGA) originally also called the Color/Graphics Adapter or IBM Color/Graphics Monitor Adapter The Hercules Graphics Card ( HGC) was a computer Graphics controller which through its popularity became a widely supported display standard. The cathode ray tube (CRT is a Vacuum tube containing an Electron gun (a source of electrons and a Fluorescent screen with internal or Modem (from mo dulator- dem odulator is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode Digital information In Telecommunications the term acoustic coupler has the following meanings An interface device for coupling electrical signals by It included a version of MS-DOS called H-DOS and bundled word processor, database, and modem software. MS-DOS (short for M icro' s' oft D isk O perating S ystem is an Operating system commercialized by Microsoft. While the Hyperion weighed just eighteen pounds (8. 2 kg), or about 2/3 the weight of the Compaq, it was not as reliable or as IBM compatible and was discontinued within two years.
H-DOS was remarkable and is of historical significance because it featured a simple menu system. The F1 through F5 keys beneath the 7" screen corresponded to five menu items displayed at the bottom of the screen. This menu was context sensitive and greatly facilitated entering DOS commands. All but the least frequently used commands were available as F-key menu selections, and this greatly reduced the amount of typing required. This user interface was comparable to the many DOS shell programs available at the time, but functioned much more smoothly because of the soft key concept.
The soft keys were also a feature of the word processor, database, and modem software that came bundled with the Hyperion, where they were used to select application commands from context sensitive menus.
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