or, discovering and recovering a lost programming language over the course of a weekend

I go down rabbit holes. One of the great pleasures of this dumb future we live in is that you can dig through the milk crates of our culture forever, following whatever interests you, and there is no bottom. My latest rabbit hole looked something like this:

• I have been spending a few minutes each day seeking out backgrounds for use on Google Meet calls at work that match my t-shirts.
• I was wearing a t-shirt featuring some early computer comic art from a Beagle Bros catalogue, drawn by Robert Cavey
• Started poking around at old Beagle Bros catalogues, settled on this background
• Started poking around Apple II magazines for more Bob Cavey comics
• Discovered the following advertisement:

Wait, hold on a minute. This kind of sounds exactly like the weird idealized programming environment I keep in my head. Obviously with serious restrictions and caveats, but, as a learning tool? They implemented this on an Apple II in 1984? How far exactly did they go?