I worked on a lot of those "green screen" (or "orange screen") apps.

Limited to keyboard and 24x80 screen, but yes, the apps were lean & responsive -- sub-second response time, and keyboard muscle memory. And some shops I worked in capped your DB calls to <25 per transaction. In stark contrast to some of the Laravel apps I've worked in recent years where the SQL logs showed me 300-400+ DB calls on a given request :(