R. Mark Clayton

Manchester

Systems Consultant

I remeber seeing one of these in operation in the early 1970's.

In fact only the boot program was entered on hand switches, normal programs were on paper tape.

A computer scientist had worked out that you could compile an assembler program in two passes as long as the second pass was in reverse, so as the source was read in the punch generated an intermediate tape. This was then read in backwards in the second pass and the final program punched out.