Adventures in Paper Tape with a 9830A

[mrcity]

Hi everyone, newbie here I'm looking for interesting things to do with my 9830A, and getting it interfaced to a paper tape machine seems like something that would be very fun to show off once it's working. I'd appreciate the affirmation from those who are familiar with this that my research/read of the documentation is correct, and to know of any pitfalls or gotchas, because the last thing I want is to fry 50-year-old equipment.

The first question is about GPIB. Assuming I have a punch/reader combo unit with GPIB, is there any functional difference between the 59405A HP-IB Calculator Interface vs. the HP 11144A ASCII bus interface? The logic diagram in the Programming and Service Manual shows very few differences between them, and a cursory look at the documentation didn't highlight anything else specific about one versus the other. Then, as I understand, I need to find one of these cards equipped with "Option 030" to be compatible with my 9830A.

Next up, I need the HP 11272A Extended I/O ROM in order to send the correct commands to control the device, right?

What if the paper tape machine comes with two ports? Do I need to populate both channels, or can I get away with hooking up just one GPIB cable between one 11144A/59405A to one channel of the paper tape machine?

Does the computer care how fast the paper machine can read/write? Like, I won't run into weird buffering problems or something if it runs slower than an HP 9863A paper tape reader, right?

Finally, is there anyone who happens to want to sell either a 9860A or 9863A? However, that'd leave me needing the correct interface cables even still, not to mention cards for the 9860A, which I'm guessing are a lot harder to track down than paper tape.

Thanks very much for your time! I think this'll be really cool to work on and would love to keep y'all abreast of the updates, but for now I have to get some sleep...

- Stephen