My first PC - a Heathkit H8 - had a numeric keypad that could be used for loading RAM contents with a program and starting execution at some address. I don't re

My first PC - a Heathkit H8 - had a numeric keypad that could be used for loading RAM contents with a program and starting execution at some address. I don't recall if it was decimal, hex or octal but it was a lot more convenient than the IMSAI at school that had a bank of paddles to set 1/0 to load into memory. But my first encounter with computers was Fortran on an IBM fed with punch cards. Very unforgiving. No backspace. And local jerks would slip already punched cards into the feed hopper so those had to be checked before punching any cards. And the error messages were absolutely opaque.