Yes, I was wondering about this too. I also tracked this down to the IEEE article but it unfortunately has no other detail. I find it hard to conceive that a 20

Yes, I was wondering about this too. I also tracked this down to the IEEE article but it unfortunately has no other detail. I find it hard to conceive that a 20-line program would take three days to toggle into a computer, even if each line expanded to several words of computer memory. Here's some speculation, though. The SPEEDAC had 4096 18-bit words. [1] If one were able to toggle manually at a rate of one bit per second, it would take over 20 hours of toggling to fill memory. If you add time to recheck values, set addresses correctly, and so forth, it's quite plausible that loading a large program would take three full eight-hour workdays. An automatic loader would thus save the three days it would have taken to toggle in a program that filled memory. Again, this is just my speculation. But regardless, it's a remarkable achievement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEEDAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEEDAC