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From: LINDSAY@TL-20B.arpa
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: HYPERION - Portable PC Question!
Message-ID: <4166@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 26-Sep-86 06:39:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.4166
Posted: Fri Sep 26 06:39:21 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 30-Sep-86 19:23:07 EDT
Sender: news@brl-smoke.ARPA
Lines: 25

I agree with Andy Glew.  If a game doesn't run on your Hyperion, then it's
probably better to work on your serenity than to work on your hardware.

I am the implementor of IN:SCRIBE, the screen editor that was distributed with
the Hyperion. ( I wonder if Commodore picked it up when they bought the
designs from Comterm, nee Bytec, nee Dynalogic.) 

When the design was started, there weren't any clones on the market, and the
only portables used the Z80. It wasn't clear how the market would evolve, or
how quickly. The initial design assumption was that programmers would care 
about portability: for instance, IN:SCRIBE is portable. Then they started to 
try outside software on their prototypes, and it became clear that practically 
everything they had done to make the machine cheaper or faster was "wrong" and 
had to be undone.

The long and short of it is that they got the major commercial packages to
run, and then stopped. I believe that some modern clones are even less
compatible (but many are more compatible). This is the sort of thing
that gets learned by experience, and that gets decided by the marketing
department.

Sorry the news wasn't better.

Don Lindsay
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