You are so right - I am remembering the bit switches on the IBM 1130... on the 1620 it was "sense switches". And now that you remind me, I do remember that we memorized the cold start sequence and typed it in....but that was 50+ years ago. Speaking of cold start cards, we made up a cold start card for the 1130 that worked correctly no matter what orientation it was put in the card hopper. (Really!)

Yup. IBM 1620 with hydraulic disk drive that always leaked hydraulic oil on the floor! An I think it had 40K of 6-bit Binary Coded Decimal "digits". Pretty quickly learned how to cold-start it by using the bit switches mounted on the front of the selectric typewriter that was the operator's consol. Punch cards and a 60 lines per MINUTE line printer (upper case only). Those were the good old days.

Roy Williams