High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The HP 3000 series is a family of minicomputers released by Hewlett-Packard in 1973. It was designed to be the first minicomputer delivered with a full featured operating system with time-sharing. The first models were withdrawn from the market until speed improvements could be made. It ultimately became known as a reliable and powerful business system. Early models had large cabinets with front panels, while later models were made that fit into desks using only terminal consoles for diagnostics, with bootstrap routines in ROM. Models ranged from a system sometimes used by a single user, to models that supported over two thousand users.