Why? Probably to prove that he was the geekiest of us all.
I remember a system that was touted by Nibble (an Apple II programming mag published by Mike Harvey; there’s a nice website with archival material now). It consisted of a scanner and some software, and the programs (BASIC, binary, whatever) were printed out in strips. The strip reader device would scan in the strip and you’d have a flawless program in memory without typing (or typos). Also, the user could output programs as strips, to a printer.