It ran at the then-fast speed of 50 Mbits/second, performance that would not be matched by commodity hardware until the introduction of Fast Ethernet in 1995.
HYPERchannel ran over very thick coax cable or fibre optic extensions and required adaptor hardware the size of a minicomputer.
Solutions for Control Data, IBM, UNISYS, and Cray computers were their primary products, but a wide variety of support emerged in the 1980s, including DEC VAX, and similar superminicomputers.
A major product was RDS (Remote Device Support), in which an IBM mainframe could connect to an adapter through its FIPS channel, which would communicate over a trunk to an adapter with a comms link, possibly to another continent, where it could drive a remote FIPS channel to drive IBM peripherals such as tape units, printers and the like.
The Hyperchannel Trunk was a LAN made of up to four parallel coaxial cables carrying 50 Mbit/s, which, at the time, was considered leading-edge technology.