In grad school ('75-76), I used an ASR33 teletype connected to a DataGeneral system when I was on the campus. At home I dialed in using a glass teletype (ADM3) and acoustic coupler at 110 Baud (later I got up to the smoking speed of 300 Baud).
I had to write a tiny Algol compiler using DataGeneral Basic (because that is what I had access to) and it wasn't pretty. Up to a point, it worked well.
At the end, the Dean told me that I was the biggest single user of computer time on campus. I didn't tell them that most of that time was spent playing StarTrek.
The other grim project was writing an 8080 Assembler in PL/I (which I kind of liked) but I had to run it on the business 360-45, time available. That didn't work well either but the assembler turned out fine. I needed the assembler because my Altair 8800 didn't have much in the way of software. That changed rather quickly as Basic, C, PL/I and Pascal became available over the next 5 years.
I started programming in Fortran on an IBM1130 in '70. Something like this:
http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/dev/ibm1130/ibm1130.htmlThe system, along with the IBM Electronic Circuit Analysis Program (ECAP) was quite helpful getting me through undergrad (EE). I now have an FPGA implementation of the entire system including the plotter and it runs all of the original IBM software including the 27 pass Fortran compiler.
Good times!