> Every time the system was powered down it lost the program and it had
> to be hand entered at next power up. That was a National
> Semiconductors SC/MP processor. Data input from 8 binary switches,
> address could be from 16 binary switches but in this case the
> processor was used to automagically step to the next instruction and
> halt, thereby providing addressing, Such high technology. AFAIR it had
> 128 BYTES of total program and data memory (combined) so the program
> keying in task was never too too severe - as long as you didn't make
> an entry error. That was "a long time ago" :-). (Counts on fingers and
> toes - just over 30 years ago I think).

I seem to remember watching someone do this on a Burroughs machine to load a 
paper tape that then booted to a disk of some sort. Minimal work with the 
switches allowed a basic boot program to load from the tape which could do 
error handling on booting from disk. 

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