[off topic but appropriate] Re: Can't compile Fortran in Fedora 7

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 12:56:42 -0500,
  "Mikkel L. Ellertson" <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> wrote:
> Richard England wrote:
> > 
> > I believe he was referring to the bank of switches on the front panel of
> > his computer by which you could set the memory locations, thereby
> > entering the boot program.
> > 
> > Boy what a pain that was.
> > 
> I agree, they were a pain to use. But they were not DIP switches. I
> have used both toggle and rocker style switches, but not DIP switch
> on a front panel.

PDP8's had toggle switches. It's been a while, but what I remember is that
you first set a mode switch to load the address, then you switched to a load
data mode and you would set up the data and hit a load toggle that would
load the data and advance to the next address.
Usually you would load a few bootstrap instructions, then load a simple loader
from paper tape, then load a more advanced loader from paper tape, then load
your program.