I knew it I knew computers were supposed to have a bunch of lights on the front. And not this garbage they have been selling me all these years.
Actually one of the first computers I used in the workplace was a TI 960B, it had a bunch of led on the front and a bunch of switches. The leds were for the data and address bus ans would blink as the computer worked.
To boot the compute, you had to key in a bootstrap with the switches, that would boot the card reader, which booted the computer and hard drive.
TO also had a computer that had a voice synthesizer. It would announce errors with voice commands. One error was "Shut er down Clancy, she's a pumpin sludge". Whn you looked the error up in the manual, it meant fatal error. TI got their start in the oil exploration business.
I first worked with the Digital PDP-8/E ... bootstrapping programs and cassette tapes. Although I did work with HP's and Wang's computers, we "borrowed" a punch card machine to use to create the data stream. It was a scant 30 or so years ago.