The Orion was a mid-range mainframe computer introduced by Ferranti in 1959 and installed for the first time in 1961. Ferranti positioned Orion to be their primary offering during the early 1960s, complementing their high-end Atlas and smaller systems like the Sirius and Argus. The Orion was based on a new type of logic circuit known as "Neuron" and included built-in multitasking support, one of the earliest commercial machines to do so (the KDF9 being a contemporary).
Performance of the system was much less than expected and the Orion was a business disaster, selling only about eleven machines. The Orion 2 project was quickly started to address its problems, and five of these were sold. Its failure was the capstone to a long series of losses for the Manchester labs, and with it, Ferranti management grew tired of the entire computer market. The division was sold to International Computers and Tabulators (ICT), who selected the Canadian Ferranti-Packard 6000 as their mid-range offering, ending further sales of the Orion 2.