Since we announced our new name, we’ve had a number of friends and customers ask what it means, and since we always aim to please, we thought we’d give you the skinny.
To the ancient Greeks, Hyperion was one of the twelve Titans, the children of Gaia (Earth) and Uranus (Sky).
His name means “High One,” literally “He who watches from above,” from the Greek word hyper, meaning "above." Hyperion is the god of heavenly light, and the father of Helios (the Sun), Selene (the Moon), and Eos (the Dawn).
Hyperion (along with all the other Titans) was overthrown and imprisoned by his nephew Zeus, because Zeus had a mad on for his Dad, Kronos.
Granted, Kronos had swallowed all his children, so Zeus had a point.
But you can’t keep a good Titan down, and Hyperion has continued to reappear throughout history ever since the days of Aeschylus;
Hyperion is the name of a moon of Saturn, a species of beetles, a super-cluster of galaxies in space a QUADRILLION times bigger than the Sun, and the world’s tallest known tree, a coastal redwood in Northern California.
John Keats wrote a poem titled Hyperion in 1819, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellowwrote a novel of the same title in 1839.
More recently, Hyperion is the title of a science-fiction novel by Dan Simmons, the first of a series called Hyperion Cantos.
There are a lot of companies, places,
and vehicles, both real and fictional,
using the name, and a few record albums and computer programs.
Rolls-Royce made a car called the Hyperion in 2008, but they only made one and it cost about $5 million.
There’s also a Hyperion roller coaster in Poland.
In the 1930s, there was a British race horse named Hyperion.
Hyperion was one of the smallest horses to ever win a British Classic.
When Hyperion died, his owner Lord Derby and his associates toasted him from a bottle of cognac that had been opened in honor of Winston Churchill. They drank “To the two greatest Grand Old Men of our time.”
A life-size statue of him stands in front of the Jockey Club headquarters in Newmarket.
Most people are probably familiar with the name Hyperion through the Walt Disney Company.
One of their publishing divisions is named Hyperion, as is a theater at the California Adventure theme park, and the software they use to render their CGI movies is called Hyperion.
All of these are named in honor of the Disney Studios location from 1926 to 1939, 2719 Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles. (There’s a Gelson’s Market there today.)
Known within the company as “The Hyperion Studio,” it was where Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated film, was made, and the Disney people are fond of the name.
In 1969, Marvel Comics writer-editor Roy Thomas decided it would be fun to have the Avengers fight a group that looked an awful lot like DC’s Justice League of America. He came up with “The Squadron Sinister,“ featuring characters based on Batman, Green Lantern, Flash, and Superman; the Superman knock-off was named Hyperion.
Later the Squadron Sinister was replaced by a group from an alternate reality,
“the Squadron Supreme,” again led by Hyperion. After a number of appearances by different alternate-reality versions over several years, one of them was eventually given his own comic, Supreme Power, and eventually yet another version of Hyperion joined the Avengers for a while in 2012.
Hyperion also features strongly in the video game Borderlands;
the villain of the story, Handsome Jack, is President of the Hyperion Corporation.
As you can see, Hyperion Computerworks follows in a long tradition with a name that means the best.
Hyperion embodies our high standards; we strive to reach higher and be better than our
competition.
