But what source code debuggers did they have available?
Other than gdb, I can't name any Unix C source code debuggers.
I believe they were working on Unix before GDB was created (wikipedia says gdb was created in 1986 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gdb).
Plan 9 has acid, but from the man page and english manual, the debugger is closer to cli/tui than gui.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Debugger