Adventures in Paper Tape with a 9830A

[mrcity]

Everything has showed up (well, except for my extra paper tape supply)! I finally got the nerve to try punching paper tape yesterday after poring over the documentation. Basically here's the lowdown:

• I have to turn on the FACIT tape machine first, and then the 9830.
• If I use the command CMD "U","E", wait a few seconds, then hit STOP, it will punch the ASCII code for "E" onto the tape.
• Thereafter, it only punches the alignment hole.
• Sometimes it gets cantankerous and doesn't punch the alignment hole, but still advances the tape by one space.
• Often times, the machine will freeze up (with a blank screen) and not even respond to STOP until about 30 seconds or so.
• If I let it sit in this frozen state for more than a minute after running CMD, chances are it'll return me to the prompt (the sideways T shows up and it's unfrozen), but then pressing the STOP key doesn't cause anything to happen with the paper tape machine.
  

My thought process is that after the calculator is turned on, it should send signals to clear the bus of any addresses and also be unaddressed itself. Thus, I send "U" in command mode because that's the talk address of the calculator, but don't follow it with anything because I don't know what the listener address of the paper tape machine is. (There are 8 DIP switches on it that I'm not sure what they're for, and my best shot at getting documentation closed down a few years ago.) After that, the next string is what you're sending in data mode. If I make it any longer than one character, it seems to just print the one character (or one alignment hole, or move one space).

The thing that kind of makes this a bummer is there's no sprocket under the paper tape punch -- only for the reader portion -- so it's pretty much impossible to check my work by pulling out the tape under the punch and then resetting it and still have future punches line up.

The next adventure would, of course, be reading from the paper tape. I have plenty of tape with all 8 holes per line punched, but as I understand, that often means "I made a mistake here" and might get ignored. I need to make sure it reads into a variable that can show me the numeric value on tape, I guess.