The earliest microcomputers, such as the Altair 8800 (released first in 1975) and an even earlier, similar machine (based on the Intel 8008 CPU) had no bootstrapping hardware as such. When started, the CPU would see memory that would contain executable code containing only binary zeros—memory was cleared by resetting when powering up. The front panels of these machines carried toggle switches for entering addresses and data, one switch per bit of the computer memory word and address bus. Simple additions to the hardware permitted one memory location at a time to be loaded from those switches to store bootstrap code. Meanwhile, the CPU was kept from attempting to execute memory content. Once correctly loaded, the CPU was enabled to execute the bootstrapping code. This process was tedious and had to be error-free. The boot process for minicomputers and microcomputers was revolutionized by the introduction of integrated circuit read-only memory (ROM), with its many variants, including mask-programmed ROMs, programmable ROMs (PROM), erasable programmable ROMs (EPROM), and flash memory. These allowed firmware boot programs to be included as part of the computer. The introduction of an (external) ROM was in an Italian telephone switching elaborator, called "Gruppi Speciali", patented in 1975 by Alberto Ciaramella, a researcher at CSELT. Gruppi Speciali was, starting from 1975, a fully single-button machine booting into the operating system from a ROM memory composed from semiconductors, not from ferrite cores. Although the ROM device was not natively embedded in the computer of Gruppi Speciali, due to the design of the machine, it also allowed the single-button ROM booting in machines not designed for that (therefore, this "bootstrap device" was architecture-independent), e.g. the PDP-11. Storing the state of the machine after the switch-off was also in place, which was another critical feature in the telephone switching contest. Typically, every microprocessor will, after a reset or power-on condition, perform a start-up process that usually takes the form of "begin execution of the code that is found starting at a specific address" or "look for a multibyte code at a specific address and jump to the indicated location to begin execution". A system built using that microprocessor will have the permanent ROM occupying these special locations so that the system always begins operating without operator assistance.