Typing stuff, interacting at a virtual terminal, sure. But if you key in a bootloader via the toggle switches on the console, you quickly learn to think in oct

Typing stuff, interacting at a virtual terminal, sure. But if you key in a bootloader via the toggle switches on the console, you quickly learn to think in octal (base-8). If you live with the console blinkenlights for a while, you get a sense of roughly what the machine is doing as it winds its way through the code. As with flight simulators, you can learn a great deal with virtual machines and simulators. But without tactile feedback, you won't quite understand how other people experienced these machines. And much of the programming idioms arise from those experiences.