The first computer I saw was programmed by a set of manual toggle switches.
There were eight toggle switches, each representing one bit. At start of day the process was as.
Flip the eight switches up/down according to a written instruction. Hit the ‘submit’ button. Then repeat for the next byte.
This would crest a ‘boot loader’ by putting instructions into the first few dozen memory locations. When the ‘run’ button was pressed, it would load the main program from magnetic tape.
It was impressive seeing how quickly the operators could do all of this from memory!
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