That's really interesting. I worked in PCI (payment cards industry) and we had terminals we could relay the ISO8583 messages through, eventually opting to emulate via software for obvious reasons.

Always so cool to hear about this sort of stuff.

What is normal though? From the perspective of a hardware engineer, from the perspective of a contractor or small company developer, from the perspective of a developer at a medium-sized firm, and from the perspective of an engineer at a FAANG, what is normal is different. Twitter famously doesn't have a dev environment and that's not a bad thing. That's because coordinating umpteen teams to have an actually useful dev-dev and qa-dev env costs more than it's worth, in their eyes. And then, what does normal look like depends on when, too. Local dev envs looked a lot different before Docker came on the scene.

So back to the question, what's the dev env look like? :)