It was .. bearable .. back in those days I wrote a lot of database recovery software, and mostly worked on an undelete tool for the Progress 4GL Database which I customized for the customer needs - so all I really ever needed to edit on the Portfolio, while on a cross-country tiger-team flight, were the constraints/extents/geometry of the deleted databases, so it was never a full strain .. back at HQ, I of course just used my dumb terminal and MIPS machine for 'real development', but it was always fun to arrive at the catastrophe, wire up the Portfolio, and either run the DOS binary or do a recompile on the target recovery machine ..
I did write a few games for it, entirely on the machine, in-between flights .. that was fun. Still out there somewhere (swar.c, a space-war game..)