(In my aerospace company days, our group evaluated a large number of forgotten machines, from the Apollo Domain and Symbolics 3600 down to the Terak. This was the era of weird UNIX workstations and things that were sort of like IBM PCs, but different. So I got to see most of the hardware of that era. Eventually settled on Sun 2 machines and 4.3BSD.)

The compiler/run/debug & repeat cycle was light years ahead of how we developed on the mainframe. On the mainframe, using PL/1, you had a global onerror handler that would dump all variables and do a core dump of your program failed/crashed. The output was on from a line printer that you usually got a few hours after you submitted your job. On average you got 1 maybe 2 job runs a day. At least we didn’t have to use punch cards like the electrical engineers did for their Fortran programs; we used “glass TTYs” where we could save our virtual cards to a file system and later modify. Oh, and you needed to have the magic JCL cards at the beginning or your job. Those were the days.

Later that year the CS dept got their own VAX and from then on most coursework was done on that system using BSD Unix. The EE’s still had to use punch cards on the mainframe.

We did have a few other systems for some courses but the majority of stuff ended up being C or Pascal on Unix (with the occasional language like lisp or prolog for some classes.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25