In the early seventies, companies like HP and Wang sold 'programmable desktop calculators' that were really personal computers in the time before what is usually thought of as the dawn of personal computers.
At the same time, there was a demand for small computers to control lab and factory equipment, and this demand would tend to occur in the same sort of places as would be buying desktop calculators. So it seems likely that people would be wanting to use programmable calculators for equipment control.
The de facto – and indeed de jure – standard interface for computers controlling random equipment was RS-232.
But looking over the specs of the early HP and Wang programmable calculators, I can't find any mention of them having RS-232 ports.
Did any of the early programmable calculators have RS-232 ports? (Or if not, why not?)
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