[2] Prior to founding Reply, Petracca worked at International Business Machines from 1976 to 1988, starting out at the company's Boulder, Colorado, office as an industrial engineer in various capacities.

According to InformationWeek, Reply was the first company to license Micro Channel—a bus architecture which IBM introduced with the PS/2 and which Petracca helped launch—for a PS/2 clone.

[8] Reply touted the modularity of these computers, arranging their cases in a so-called "5×5" design: five drive bays and five expansion slots.

This daughterboard approach, which Reply termed the TurboProcessor, meant that the computers could be upgraded with faster processors over the lifespans of the motherboards.

[13] In October 1990, Reply joined thirteen other makers of MCA machines—including IBM—in an alliance to push Micro Channel as the sole standard for 32-bit computers.

This alliance, named the Micro Channel Developers Association, was intended to compete with the so-called Gang of Nine, an aggregate of PC clone manufacturers unofficially led by Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, who were backing the Extended Industry Standard Architecture directly against IBM.

[25] Reply laid off 40 of its 100 employees in October 1992, prompted by a $5 million loss in profit amid fierce price war in the PC industry ushered in by Compaq.

Reply surveyed their customers as to how the company should reinvent itself and decided to phase out manufacturing complete machines, instead releasing upgrade motherboards for existing IBM PS/2s.

[5] These motherboards, which Reply marketed as the TurboProcessor System Upgrade (later as the PowerBoard[26]), were released starting in December 1992, allowing modern processors such as IBM's own 386SLC and Intel's i486DX2 to be installed in late-1980s-issue PS/2s,[27] of which three to four million were estimated to be still in regular use in large companies.

The company also announced several MCA expansion cards, including graphics and sound upgrades and an IDE drive adapter.

[32] In addition, they teased a PowerPC upgrade board for the PS/2, spurred by developments in the contemporaneous alliance between Apple, Motorola and IBM.

[37] In December that year, Reply released the DOS on Mac expansion card for Apple's Power Macintosh 8100, allowing it to run MS-DOS and Windows applications off a Cyrix 5x86 or an Intel DX4.

In April that year, Reply sold their DOS on Mac technology to Radius, a hardware company based in Sunnyvale, California.