As may be, just going on observation that when I got to college, several of the profs still had punch decks lying around the offices. Granted that said offices

As may be, just going on observation that when I got to college, several of the profs still had punch decks lying around the offices. Granted that said offices were not more than 3 minutes walk from the computing center where the mainframe lived. Clearly anyone miles from campus, or anyone seeking any kind of interactive session, would want a tty. But evidently if you wanted to run your program more than once, and didn't want to incur the rental charge for online "DASD" storage, batch-job card decks had been an option. I presume that did not exclude BASIC programs. Also, I suppose "era in which BASIC first evolved" would have better been stated as "part of the era in which BASIC first flourished"