HP-97S 'Proto' ?

[Kostas Kritsilas]

I had one of these "non S" HP 97S a long time ago. At the time, I did some research, and found that there were standard HP-97 units that were modified by a third party to add the external pods. They were some form of a non-standard pod that communicated using some handshake and BCD encoding. That was as far as I ever got. Since this was a while ago, I can't recall the name of the company that did this, altough later on, HP brought out the HP-97S and the company stopped making there own version of the HP-97S. Evidently, there was enough demand that HP felt that they needed a HP-97S.