@herchenroder @davidbisset Yes... except it's not really a short amount of time. Next year will mark 50-years. 50-years before I learned to program we didn't have wired telephones :-)
In 1984 I wrote some PC Assembler code which became the basis for a mainframe programmers workbench. We used Micro Focus Cobol on PC's the programmers would submit compiles on the mainframe in batch, they were auto downloaded and syntax checked on the PC before being compiled on the mainframe.
@herchenroder @davidbisset I was working at Chemical Bank in NYC - I helped design the server side of the worlds first home banking system, PRONTO. Hank Kees was a VP at the bank and we used to do all sorts of mad stuff. Thom Henderson who designed the ARC file format was a contractor, we did the port to the IBM mainframe described in this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(file_format)
It's a tale of programming in the 1980's - ARC became the ZIP file format. Some much time has passed, so many technologies.
@herchenroder @davidbisset I had the pleasure, and it was a pleasure, of working with Hank Kees who won a PC Tech Journal award the first year with some guy called Bill Gates and a guy called Phillipe Kahn who had written a Pascal compiler for MS-DOS.
"Standing on the shoulders of giants!"