Ah, the venerable old pdp-11. I have very fond memories of those. Almost bought one for myself when they became dirt cheap, but the electric bill to run it made in impractical.

How many instructions did I toggle in on the front panel? Just enough to enter a simple monitor program to input code from a teletype and save to a disk file. I then bootstrapped the monitor via the teletype into what eventually became a fairly powerful program with built in assembler, disassembler, monitoring and debugging facilities.

The highlight of that effort was when the company I worked for had a hardware problem with a machine that generated a lot of revenue. DEC support couldn't solve the problem. After escalating up to their "world-class" support, who spent several days investigating the problem and still couldn't fix it, I was asked to take a look at it. With my trusty monitor program I disassembled relevant parts of the OS, wrote a few quick test routines with the built-in assembler, and had the problem fixed within about two hours.

Those were the good old days :-)