Hence, in the early days, you had no choice but to flip the power switch with everything "up and running" so to speak.

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No, what you did was restart the machine and it would dismount the system floppy, eject it and go back to the flashing floppy/question mark icon.

Then you could switch it off as the disk was dismounted and ejected.

All the more recent shutdown did was do the same, but blacken the screen and put up the "safe to shutdown" alert before the reset.