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It was distributed on paper tape. You needed a teletype with a paper tape reader to run it. Basically you would manually enter a bootloader using the switches on the Altair's front panel, and the bootloader would read BASIC off the tape and into RAM. If the checksum passed, it would then jump into BASIC. Here's a video of the process if you're interested: https://youtu.be/TxU_3dEJ2nM?t=1013

It was stored on a punched paper tape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#Origin_and_develo...

Paul Allen entered it in front of the customer for the first run

https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx

I expect it was distributed on tape as well.

"he’d forgotten to write the bootstrap loader" He didn't load the whole program from the switches on the face, just the bootstrap that would let them feed the paper tape through the teletype/paper tape reader that was common at the time. It would take a very very long time to load the whole program by hand. See this video of a demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxU_3dEJ2nM

damn, that's a crazy process- thanks for the video link