My dad had an Imsai 8080 when I was a kid. A casette tape stored a program something like 1 or 2k in size. You entered each byte by manually setting 8 switches to the bits of each successive byte, and then hit a button for “enter.” This was in the early 70’s, IIRC. That was the cutting edge of technology at the time, and we were one of a very few to have a personal computer at all at that time.
Yeah I had the same, but didn’t have the luxury of a recorder. You flip the binary toggle switches and press the enter button to load each byte as you recall. Do that over and over many dozens of times to load up some routine, and hope you didn’t screw up. I always locked the door when loading up a routine so I wouldn’t be distracted.
An Imsai 8080 is worth a LOT of money to a collector today. I sent away for information on it, didn't buy it (mistake), but years later I sold just the paperwork for good money.