[mbreese]

Assembly? Ha! In my day, we would have considered ourselves lucky to have had assembly, let alone a C compiler. No, we had to bootstrap our computers using switches and paper tape. You probably want a terminal too!

In all seriousness, the bootstrap process is fascinating to me. At some point, it did all start with switches and manually loading commands directly into memory. And over time, we’ve slowly kept this thing going and growing. Also… I’m old enough to have seen a Altair with toggle switches, but I’m not old enough to have had to toggle in a boot loader on one. :)