It's 1 AM in Brazil now... so I am sleepy and I didn't get it... the question is retorical, genuine or a joke?

Programming a 8051 flipping switches? I sugest you to find a 8051 kit with a hex keypad and enter programs (small ones... 100 bytes or less) using the keypad... I think that you'll see that manual entry is a bad idea... if you really want to add pain to your experience I suggest some system that hasn't checksum so you can have fun when you mistype a character or slip a line.

that should be enough to show you that flipping switches for programming is a bad idea... If it wasn't we should be using it today...

orlando