HLH Orion

The Orion was a series of 32-bit super-minicomputers designed and produced in the 1980s by High Level Hardware Limited (HLH), a company based in Oxford, UK. The company produced four versions of the machine:

• The original Orion, sometimes referred to as the "Microcodeable Orion".
• The Orion 1/05, in which the microcodeable CPU was replaced with the much faster Fairchild Clipper RISC C-100 processor providing approximately 5.5 MIPS of integer performance and 1 Mflop of double precision floating point performance.
• The Orion 1/07 which offered approximately 33% greater performance over the 1/05 (7.3 MIPS and 1.33 Mflops).
• The Orion 1/10 based on a later generation C-300 Clipper from the Advanced Processor Division at Intergraph Corporation that required extensive cooling. The Orion 1/10 offered a further 30% improvement for integer and single precision floating point operations and over 150% improvement for double precision floating point (10 MIPS and 3 Mflops).

All four machines employed the same I/O sub-system.