This is one of the many things I learned from the destroyallsoftware screencasts [0] so many years ago. Before that I used vim in a gui (MacVim). Along with moving to tmux this completely changed how I work.
I haven't used many esoteric environments, but wikipedia says it "exists in most modern Unix shells" and the timeline for first adding it was the late 70s early 80s.
Job control was first implemented in csh, another Bill Joy invention, although I believe that particular feature was added by someone else.