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Earlier microcomputer systems such as the MITS Altair used a series of switches on the front of the machine to enter data.

In order to do anything useful, the user had to enter a small program known as the " bootstrap loader " into the machine using these switches, a process known as booting.

Once loaded, the loader would be used to load a larger program off a storage device like a paper tape reader.

It would often take upwards of five minutes to load the tiny program into memory, and a single error while flipping the switches meant that the bootstrap loader would crash the machine.

This could render some of the bootstrap code garbled, in which case the programmer had to reenter the whole thing and start all over again.