The U-Matic era was in Public Access Television with simple RM-440 controllers using non-frame accurate control track pulses for marking edit points.
Moving to two different local broadcast stations, the Betacam/ Type C era was with Ampex A-B editors with timecode and computer controlled edit decision lists and simple Grass Valley Model 100 switchers for wipes and dissolves. The match frame editing worked well, and the EDL worked for 'opening up' an edit to insert a new scene, but required a full new rendering to the recorder.
Our first NLE editors were Media 100s running on Macs with a small shared drive array that had just enough storage for the raw footage of about a dozen projects at a time, then eventually transitioned to Avid Xpress editors with a video server large enough to hold the entire station's video library. Not part of your video, but on-air playback also transitioned from computer controlled videotape playback using an Odetics robotic videotape handler, to having just interstitial spots on a video server but long format programs on videotape, to 100% video server.
Sadly, I am no longer in broadcasting. But read all of the trade magazines in the 1985-2010 era and closely followed the NLE development during that time. Thank YOU for the trip down memory lane.