

Real, honest question here: how are they defining “hardship”? That’s a huge range of subjective circumstances there.
To be clear, I’m not going to fire back by saying “well, that’s justifiable”. Rather, I’m curious where said “shitstains” are coming from and how they frame their choices. I only have the broad strokes here, and would love some more nuance to this story, however anecdotal. Cheers.







The answer is: binary, sometimes with electrical switches.
As late as the very early 1980’s, the PDP-11 could be started by entering a small bootstrap program into memory, using the machine’s front panel:
You toggle the switches to make the binary pattern you want at a specific location in RAM, then hit another button to store it. Repeat until the bootstrap is in RAM, and then press start to run the program from that first address. Said start address is always some hardwired starting location.
And that’s a LATE example. Earlier (programmable) systems had other mechanisms for hard-wired or manual input like this. Go back far enough and you have systems that are so fixed-function in nature that it’s just wired to do one specific job.