[dayglored]

> I used to toggle in programs in binary and after a while it becomes like playing music from memory on a keyboard. Not as difficult as you think.

Yes, it's very much like playing music! (I play piano).

My first hands-on experience with a small computer was a PDP-8e at college, with a paper tape punch and a teletype. 4K 12-bits words of core, and front-panel bat-handle toggle switches for programming it from scratch.

The reason I mentioned the story about Cray is that I toggled the PDP-8 boot loader in by hand (in octal) many times -- it was just enough to run the punched-paper tape reader so you could read in the binary image loader, which in turn could load in.... the line editor. Or the assembler... or your program...

The PDP-8 boot loader was probably tiny compared to the one for the bigger machines, but it gave me an appreciation...

[dayglored]

Incidentally, when I say " I toggled the PDP-8 boot loader in by hand (in octal)", the switches were of course individual binary digits.

I memorized the loader in octal, and my fingers soon learned the binary: 5 was up-down-up and 1 was down-down-up and so on (followed by deposit-next, of course)...

I still have dreams about that period of computing in my life (early 70's). It shaped the rest of my life.

I wish I'd known Seymour Cray. Must have been a helluva guy.