[CardCarryingMember.VastRightWC]

Actually, I'll bet few of my fellow old fogies can top this one ....

I used to power up our department's Nova Computer - made by Data General Corp - each morning by using the switches on the panel. If a switch was up it was a 1; down was 0.

There was a boot program that was about 15 lines long and 8 bits wide that someone had printed out and taped on the front. (This is because "boot rom's" were either too expensive or hadn't been invented yet.)

So you set one row of 8 up/down switches to the starting address, which was always 00000000. The other row of switches was for the data. After setting all 8 bits, you hit a spring-loaded toggle switch to the right which dumped those 8 bits into location 0. And it had a really cool, very VERY modern feature whereby it would automatically take the next 8 bits you entered and put them in the current address plus 1 (00000001). So you didn't have to keep setting the address switches to 1, and then 2, ... etc, for each new line of the program as you entered it. Wow, is that a totally rad, time-saving convenience or WHAT?!?

Once you'd entered all 15 or so lines of the program, you'd insert a well-worn paper tape in the tape reader, and start the program you'd just entered at location 0 using the Run/Halt button.

The bitty 15 line program merely did a "read next 8 bits from the paper tape reader, store them in location X+Index, increment Index, repeat loop until end-of-tape condition, then jump to address X".

As I recall, the program on the paper tape contained mainly just H/W drivers for an 8" floppy drive and a Hazeltine 2000 terminal (monitor & keyboard in one package). After the drivers were loaded into the Nova, it would load yet more pieces of a rudimentary O/S off an 8" floppy, and then you could sit down at the Hazeltine, and - voila! - play blackjack or The Game of Life ("gliders" & "blinkers" & lots more) .... until someone showed up with real work to do.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

I wrote a slot machine simulator on a desktop Olivetti-Underwood Programma 101. It only allowed ~120 assembler-like commands. You had to type the commands in through a business calculator type interface and the output was a roll of paper you would see in business calculators.

Those were the days!

[HartleyMBaldwin]

Well, my first computer ran on steam, and it took half an hour of shoveling coal just to boot up. The only typefaces were cuneiform and hieroglyphics, until they added Linear B, and the only graphics were cave paintings.

But you tell the young folks today about it, and they just won’t believe you.

[mrsmith]

LOL!
L:ove that!