When I started at GaTech in 1980 they still had card readers in the datacenter that nobody was using. I can't remember how we programmed (in Fortran 77) but it wasn't a whole lot more sophisticated than punchcards. Some sort of batch operation involving a trip to the service window. And a waiting period. I remember coding somehow on a paper teletype in the WREK studios. By the time I was finishing grad school 7 years later I was writing graphics code in $49 Turbo Pascal on my very own PC. With an add-on 80287 co-processor, natch. It was intoxicatingly awesome to sit down and code. Beautifully powerful. That's an astounding amount of progress. I don't think I've changed my coding tools significantly over the last 15 years. Emacs and c++ are better now, but the basic process & language are pretty much the same. I still have the 80287.