This was perfectly normal at the time, my first UNIX developer experience was the traditional timesharing experience, one server for everyone.
Ironically cloud based development is nothing other than going back to these days, just with other set of technologies.
Remember, "The Network is the Computer" (1984).
The thing that Sun Ray added was the ability to move to a new physical terminal without logging out of your existing session, closing your apps, reopening them, picking up where you left off, etc. Could see it being great for e.g. university professors who have to leave halfway through grading a paper and didn't want to lose their place, or a long-running process that you didn't (or couldn't) put in a screen or tmux session.
It took me a long time to adjust to a PC environment after being minicomputer/mainframe-based for a lot of my key years (from age 15 through 22, my main access to computing was through college/university systems running VAX/VMS, VM/CMS and a bit of Unix. TBH, other than its lack of pipes and a command path, I generally preferred VMS to Unix, with the VAXstation being my preferred working environment.
Never worked with VAX/VMS, however have spent enough time reading through its manuals.
Systems programming with compiled BASIC, its Extended Pascal version, the API surface that somehow we can find traces where Windows NT got its design inspiration from, really leaves some space for what ifs, in the operating systems adoption evolution.
The VMS influence is also why DOS and NT used / for options rather than - like Unix. I was a big fan of the CLD method of defining commands. It provided a nice standardized way of parsing command line arguments that was going to be consistent between all applications.
DOS uses / because programs written for CP/M, and which were subsequently ported to MS-DOS, used forward slashes.
when PC/MS-DOS 2.0 was released, with support for directories, it supported both forward and backward slashes for directory separator because Microsoft programmers wanted to use forward slashes (bringing them over from Xenix, including adding virtual "DEV" directory with device files), but for compatibility and user friendliness the default was \ for directories and / for options
Oops, the influence was a bit higher up the ancestry chain on both sides. CP/M uses / under the influence of VMS’s ancestor, TOPS-10. That’s what I get on relying on old memories of things I was told that were probably inaccurate from the start.