[PaulHoule]

My CS teacher in high school used to talk about writing FORTRAN code on punched cards in the 1960s where you could “edit” the deck by reordering the cards, type new cards on a punch machine, etc. Remember that 80 columns was the standard width for terminals for a long time because a punch card had 80 columns.

Minicomputers and mainframes had advanced interactive facilities in the early 1970s, you could use BASIC on a PDP-11 and it was about the same as using BASIC on an Apple ][ (no graphics though unless you had a GIGI terminal), edit Assembly, FORTRAN and COBOL programs with the TECO text editor and compile just like you would with C or Go on a Linux machine today. By the 1980s most mainframe development was done with VM/CMS which was a lot like using virtual machines today, to do development you would spin up a VM that ran a single user OS that was a lot like MS-DOS (or maybe it was the other way around.)