I still have an 8-inch floppy (no! I'm talking about old computer gear, not genitals!! [you pervert!] ) which I show to kids sometimes. And I can recall booting Digital Equipment machines with punched paper tape. You wrote the program and ran blank paper through a punch machine, then the computer would 'read' the code by whether there was a hole punched at each location. I think it was 1 byte per row.

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