editing programs with a text editor, saving them on cassette tapes, assembling them, etc. In the same amount of RAM you could have fit a FORTH implementation and with a disk system you could have an experience similar to BASIC based around editing individual disk blocks. With 64k of RAM I would run a C compiler on that color computer and people did the same with CP/M.
So far as mainframes at first they didn't have text editors, instead you would put together a deck of punched cards and submit that to the FORTRAN compiler which would output the object code to another deck of punched cards.
It wasn't unusual for people in the 1980s to use BASIC preprocessors that would read a text file, append line numbers, and let you use structured loops, and GOTOs with named labels. I read about
If you added a bit more RAM than that you had more of a choice, for instance a 16K Color Computer could run
https://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/EDTASM%2B
editing programs with a text editor, saving them on cassette tapes, assembling them, etc. In the same amount of RAM you could have fit a FORTH implementation and with a disk system you could have an experience similar to BASIC based around editing individual disk blocks. With 64k of RAM I would run a C compiler on that color computer and people did the same with CP/M.
So far as mainframes at first they didn't have text editors, instead you would put together a deck of punched cards and submit that to the FORTRAN compiler which would output the object code to another deck of punched cards.
It wasn't unusual for people in the 1980s to use BASIC preprocessors that would read a text file, append line numbers, and let you use structured loops, and GOTOs with named labels. I read about
https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/lang/other/ratbas/1982/
and wrote one for my TRS-80 Coco. It was the sort of thing you could write in BASIC without a lot of understanding about how to write compilers.