Programming In Machine Language In Your Head And Then Loading The Code By Flipping Front Panel Switches
| Programming | What field the skill applies to |
| When machines acquired 'soft” panels | An approximation of when the skill was made obsolete |
| Learning to program in a language | The skill or item that made this skill obsolete |
| Machine Instruction Set | The knowledge needed to perform the skill |
| Visiting the Computer Museum | When this skill could still be used in the real world |
Before compilers, before coffee, before the first protein was formed, machines had front panels with switches, lights, and templates that allowed a sentient to write data/instructions directly into a computer's main memory, and even set its program counter and start it running!
While this was made obsolete by boot ROMs?, mass storage, operating systems, useful debuggers, and general common sense, it was still useful for debugging programs and breaking into otherwise protected machines. It was, however, ponderously slow, tedious, prone to frequent error, and conducive to sore finger muscles.
It was also impressive as hell to watch someone “toggle in” a program that worked, and the geekier one was, the larger and more complex the toggled program. As a rule, the index of this skill was inversely proportional to the index of the programmer's relations with the opposite sex.
