Getting Rid of Dell Bloatware. 1831

Yep. back then you had to manually load a very small boot-strap loader that would tell the system 'Hey you have a paper tape reader. go use it' manually loading meaning, you use a series of paddle switches (one for each bit, up was a 1 and down was a 0) to set a particular address, then toggle in the binary data you want stored at that address, and hit 'deposit', on to the next address and data, 'deposbreast', etc, then finally hit the 'run' button.

I think the loader I had to toggle in by hand was maybe 20 lines.

Of course there were no crt monitors back then, it was 110baud teletypes. Then we upgraded to 300baud teletypes, then 1200baud wide-carrige printer-terminals (still no monitor).

Around that time some of the systems finally used single-sided 8" floppies.

I remember playing the originall Adventure (Colossal Cave) game on this wonderful system.

Type in a command such as 'N' (to go north) hit return, wait for the floppy to spin and read, wait for this giant wide dot-matrix printer to print out at 110baud or so, etc...

Every other day or so we'd have to drop the bottom chbuttis cover on the floppy drives and put the drive belt back on.