Gee, I thought the bootloader was the operator, who would flip the switches to enter the boot instructions, make a mistake, and kick (boot) the machine in frustration!Early programmable computers had a row of toggle switches on the front panel to allow the operator to manually enter the binary boot instructions into memory before transferring control to the CPU. The boot loader would then read the operating system in from an outside storage medium such as paper tape, punched card, or a disk drive.