Dave wrote:

Yes. On thinking about it it was the early 80s. Remember the Timex Sinclair
and the Tandy TRS-80?

I think I had a Sinclair, but I don't remember it much. I kind of
poo-poo'd the early hobby machines because I had a Digital 11/23 at
home, and my partner had a DG Nova 1200. Our first "small" machine was
a DEC "Robin," a VT100 with a Z80 CP/M machine tucked in.

....
Time was far too expensive to let the programmers anywhere near the
machine itself.

After several years of cards decks and 300 baud phone lines, my first
real programming job was with a DG mini-computer where we "owned" the
machine 100%. It was a real trip to see the lights flash as I ran my
program. I never went back to the "mainframe world" after that.