Further minicomputer and terminal products followed in the coming years, and in 1983, the company finally released a microcomputer, the HP 150 series.

InfoWorld stated that HP was "responding to demands from its customers for full IBM PC compatibility".

[2] Vectras were not entirely IBM-compatible, and in the early years, had a considerable amount of non-standard hardware features, including hard disk types, keyboards, and the mouse interface, and corresponding BIOS extensions named EX-BIOS,[3] thus requiring their own custom OEM version of MS-DOS.

Vectras notably failed to pass the most popular compatibility test of the day, which involved running Lotus 123 and Microsoft Flight Simulator.

In 2002 (following the HP-Compaq merger and the release of the VL420 and e-pc 42 models a year prior), the Vectra family was discontinued, and was replaced by the Evo, which was originally developed by Compaq.