[saltcured]

It was the same for new CS undergrads at UC Berkeley back in the early 90s. There were still labs full of VT220 or similar serial terminals all hooked up to a shared computer.

On reflection, it probably explains why I've used Emacs for my whole career but never really got into any of the elisp customization or other advanced features. I still base my work in the shell (and filesystem) and launch ephemeral Emacs processes rather than living in it as some folks do. I never got interested in IDE functions like controlling compilers nor debuggers from within Emacs.

I never even wanted Emacs to split a terminal window into smaller "screens". I learned the key combo to abort that, much like I learned only enough vi to kill off an unintended launch. But, I do get a lot of mileage out of the XEmacs "frames", i.e. independent X windows all fronting the same set of editing buffers. But I also have terminal windows alongside that to do all the other things from the shell that some people prefer to do from inside the editor...