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"To start the computer, one had to hand program the first few instructions to start reading the system tape."

When I first started reading this thread, I wondered, and hoped, if I would read something like your reply. I worked at the Night Vision Lab at Ft. Belvoir in late '69 to mid '70, and occasionally I would have to do what you called "hand program". I don't remember what kind of computer it was. It may have been a custom one, purpose built for us, because I don't remember a name on it anywhere. There was a row of switches, I can't remember how many total (18?, 21?), but as I recall, they were grouped in threes. It was really frustrating, because if you made one miscue, it was start over from the beginning.
When I finally got it right, the perforated tape reader, which was attached to the side of the printer, would activate and read what I assume was the program. The tape was very short, and I remember thinking that it sure was a lot of work just to get this thing to read a yard long piece of perforated paper.

I don't recall any drives or disks in the room. I guess they may have been in another location.

Anyway, thanks for jogging the memory. Was "hand programming" the standard way to start up back then?
What is the equivalent between what we did then (hand program, tape read) to what happens today when we turn on our computers?

Here is a picture of the IBM 1401 control panel. When the power was turned on, the memory was blank. The computer didn't know anything until some instructions were keyed in by hand. I believe the first few instructions were in Octal. After positioning the switches for an instruction, one would press an enter button. Can't remember which button it was. I believe it took about 5 or 6 separate instructions to tell it to read the tape drive. Then a run button was pushed, I think and if you did it correctly, the tape drive would start reading the tape.

Here was the output card punch, key card punch for input, the computer, the tape drives, don't remember what the next consol was, and finally the printer. And the one I was using had 4K of memory! The good old days.

Good Hunting... from Varmint Al

Anyway, thanks for jogging the memory. Was "hand programming" the standard way to start up back then?

For a while, yeah. Some of our operators did it often enough that they had the whole sequence memorized and didn't need to read it off a cheat sheet.

What is the equivalent between what we did then (hand program, tape read) to what happens today when we turn on our computers?

Now it's all read out of system ROM (read-only memory) which has the boot sequence permanently stored in it, and the CPU chip is built so it knows to look in a particular memory location when it's first turned on an start executing whatever it finds there. So the on-CPU "wake-up" instructions are equivalent to your hand-coded instructions, and the contents of the ROM are equivalent to your old paper tape.

Computer trivia: Starting up a computer is called "booting" the computer because in the old days the sequence of hand-coding the start-up program was called "bootstrapping". It was called this because getting the operating system off the ground and flying was similar to the phrase about "lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps" (which was itself inspired by the humorous image of trying to leave the ground by pulling hard upwards on your own shoelaces or "boot straps").

The computers then (and in a similar but internal sequence now) had to "lift themselves up by their own bootstraps" by manually loading a handful of instructions into them by hand, which gave them just enough information to know to (and how to) read what was on the pre-programmed paper tape, which then gave the computer just enough smarts to know how to find the disk drive (or magnetic tape) from which it would load the device drivers which would then allow it to load the operating system which would then allow it to start doing something resembling actual work.

Even today computers go through the same sort of "bootstrapping" themselves up into full competence when first powered on, but it's a lot more invisible because it's all done automatically. And it's still called "booting". :-)