In the early 80's we had terminals (Newberry being one brand iirc)that would talk to the mainframe and in this instance a Honeywell Bull DPS8 range and these terminals had block mode, so could just type out using the cursor keys to navigate and key in all your code or feild attributes as you would for a transactional screen layout input interface. Then having effectly edited and dealt with localy, could hit send into the edit buffer and covered much WYSWYG form of input and layout for screens. So many ways of doing screen editing and text entry in the real early pre PC days would of been down to the terminals and local cursor, send whole screen block mode form of editing. Unlike character mode (very early systems way of pooling terminals) in which it had to handshake each and every keystroke in effect. Though even some of these terminals could be configured to allow full screen editing mode and sent via character mode batch polling. Terminals were not cheap back then either and when the PC came out, terminal emulation software was one of the big sellers in some markets who would spend lots on the early PC's and more on this software as cheaper than the dedicated terminal offerings.