You should be able to buy a Hewlett-Packard HP-150 micro in your local computer shop by the end of this month with the confidence that at least some MSDOS software has been converted to run on the machine's "touchscreen" system.

Hewlett-Packard said last week that it has signed up an additional 100 dealers in preparation for this month's start to shipping of the £2,995 16-bit machines.

Both the Memomaker and Wordstar word processor as well as Visicalc have been configured to work with the touchscreen system. The screen is HP's alternative to Apple's mouse system and allows you to move around objects, text or the cursor by merely pointing at the appropriate spot on-screen.

Hewlett-Packard managing director David Baldwin expects a good deal more software to be ready soon for the HP-150's MSDOS 3.5" disk format. Mr. Baldwin said that although some work is required in configuring packages to use the capabilities of the touch-screen, the actual 'porting across' of programs is made much easier by HP's decision to do with an IBM-PC compatible processor and MSDOS.

This means that some software will be running on the HP-150 without using the touchscreen. The famous 1-2-3 package from Lotus, for example, has been converted to run on the HP-150 but doesn't use the screen's special capabilities.

No matter what some people think of the touch screen, the HP-150 has to be considered an expensive micro at £2.995 for the basic twin-disk version (a £2,395 configuration is also available but you can only use that model as a terminal in a mainframe system). HP's first entry into the personal computer field faces tough competition from Apple's new lower-priced Lisa machine and from the IBM PC.