I wasn't planning to use the front panel extensively because, as mentioned in the video, front-panel booting is not a practical way to start a computer. The ne

I wasn't planning to use the front panel extensively because, as mentioned in the video, front-panel booting is not a practical way to start a computer. The next step up is to use a hex keypad to enter 16 bits at a time. Some single board computers from the 1970's provided this. It was marginally practical - I used to enter programs of a couple of hundred bytes into a KIM-1 this way, it only took a few minutes. Those computers did provide a simple monitor in ROM to support this, but that code was very small - Steve Wozniak's Wozmon monitor for the Apple I was 256 bytes. You could probably design some circuitry not much more complicated than in this article to replace its row of switches with a keypad.