hand-assembling a bootstrap loader and entering it by means of front panel switches

On the first computer my dad worked this was the first task each morning, enter the device driver for the paper tape streamer. Six toggle switches (the computer had a 6 bit word), a button to advance to the next memory location and an oscillascope to show you the contents of the current memory location.

Must have been fun:

- set the toggles
- advance to the next slot
- repeat several hundred times...

Once this was done you hit "run" and it loaded every thing else from paper tape.