Adventures in Paper Tape with a 9830A

[mrcity]

Oh, and actually I forgot to mention one important aspect about all this... the paper tape itself ?

Searching for paper tape in 2021 proves difficult because the search engines all want to sell you adhesive tape, masking tape, packing tape, and whatever other nonsense that would gum up the machine. Changing it to "ribbon" gets you closer but then it's no longer paper, and not nearly an inch thick. Searching for such things as "teletype paper" and "cnc paper" led me to websites from the early 2010s making references to retailers (such as westnc) who seem to have long since gone out of business since their websites were nothing more than sketchy malware. Or, one-offs from eBay or Etsy that wouldn't do me much good if I made mistakes or needed a lot of leeway for experimentation.

Finally, the search term paper roll actually led me to a website paperroll.com (imagine that ?) where, after scrolling through page after page of paper rolls, at last I came across a roll of 1" paper tape that I'm hoping is the right weight to use with the punch, and will be enough length to write a decent program.

Anyway, I had to buy a carton of 100 of these computer paper tape rolls, so if anyone needs paper tape rolls, then we can work something out once I get them!

Now, on kind of an unrelated question, does anyone know if thermal printers care what kind of paper they're printing on? My 9830 has a 9866 printer with just a small scrap of thermal paper that came with it, but I've got a couple rolls of IBM thermal paper (for a 1986 IBM 5140 PC Convertible) that should be the same size, and probably the means to get several cartons of these rolls if I wanted (I already shipped 1 whole carton off to someone else before I got the 9830).