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The answer is: binary, sometimes with electrical switches.
As late as the very early 1980’s, the PDP-11 could be started by entering a small bootstrap program into memory, using the machine’s front panel:
You toggle the switches to make the binary pattern you want at a specific location in RAM, then hit another button to store it. Repeat until the bootstrap is in RAM, and then press start to run the program from that first address. Said start address is always some hardwired starting location.
And that’s a LATE example. Earlier (programmable) systems had other mechanisms for hard-wired or manual input like this. Go back far enough and you have systems that are so fixed-function in nature that it’s just wired to do one specific job.
- Mechanical engineering during the Ada Lovelace days
- Electrical engineering during the Z3/Turing/Manchester Computer/Grace Hopper days
Binary. Now go to sleep.
scared voice i think i saw a 2
There’s no such thing as 2.
1
Its part of the bootstrap paradox.
0
There is something to using the 8085 educational kit and feeding the values into RAM, via the HEX keyboard, that lets you connect the dots pretty easily.
They just typed 1s and 0s until something happened.
I’m imagining compilers evolving from digital primordial goo.
By handwriting raw lambda calculus.
compilers were pretty early on
