I met a guy once who had actually done programming with a hand drill.
He was working on an old mainframe that controlled a steel plant and originally this beast booted from paper tape but that had long since been worn away and replaced by a thick leather strap with holes bored in it. He had to modify the boot process so had to get a hand drill out!
I heard this around '94 from a guy in his 40s so it probably happened in the 1970s.
I really miss programming by toggling switches on the front panel of the machine, to set bits in memory words, like they used to do in some of the earliest computers, like in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Stephen Levy ;)
He was working on an old mainframe that controlled a steel plant and originally this beast booted from paper tape but that had long since been worn away and replaced by a thick leather strap with holes bored in it. He had to modify the boot process so had to get a hand drill out!
I heard this around '94 from a guy in his 40s so it probably happened in the 1970s.