And it also could involve manual manipulation of things holding the data.
I may not have ever worked with lots of switches or cards or big reel-to-reels, but for our family’s first computer we had a Radio Shack cassette player that I could hook to it to load software. It was an ordeal to put in a tape, rewind if necessary and coordinate pressing play on the cassette tape player with the load command I had to enter in to load a program. Those were the days!
I could also record and load my own programs from the tapes. Press the record and play buttons at the same time and hit enter on that keyboard!
Granted our first computer also had cartridges, but I only had a few for it.
It was like Christmas (or literally was Christmas) whenever we got new software from anywhere, whether it was from Radio Shack or a bookstore that had a few or more tapes available.
That’s why I started to program. It was fun, and it was the only way to get new software whenever I wanted it. Early on it was entering programs from the manual, but I learned quickly to write my own.
When I later got a 5 1/4” floppy drive, it was so awesome, especially once I got an Apple and could trade/copy disks from others, stores, a local college, and the library.
Even once we got a modem, you still had put the data somewhere, so it went on floppies.
Everything was physical and novel then. It was so awesome.