A nostalgic, slightly melancholic digital painting of a 1990s software developer's cluttered desk, featuring a bulky CRT monitor displaying a brightly colored, text-based IDE interface with visible code. The scene is warm and detailed, with a coffee mug, scattered floppy disks, and a thick programming manual, all bathed in the soft glow of the monitor in a dimly lit room.
A nostalgic, slightly melancholic digital painting of a 1990s software developer's cluttered desk, featuring a bulky CRT monitor displaying a brightly colored, text-based IDE interface with visible code. The scene is warm and detailed, with a coffee mug, scattered floppy disks, and a thick programming manual, all bathed in the soft glow of the monitor in a dimly lit room.

The IDEs We Had 30 Years Ago... And We Lost

In the early 1990s, the software development landscape was dominated by powerful, feature-rich Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) that offered capabilities many modern developers might envy. These tools emerged during a golden age of desktop computing, when software companies competed fiercely to create the ultimate programming environment.

The Borland Era

Turbo Pascal (1983) and Borland C++ (1990) set the standard for what an IDE could be. These weren't just text editors with compilation capabilities—they were complete development ecosystems. Turbo Pascal, in particular, became legendary for its lightning-fast compilation speed and integrated debugger that ran comfortably on machines with as little as 256KB of RAM.

The Borland IDEs featured:

Visual Development Environments

Microsoft Visual Basic (1991) revolutionized application development with its visual form designer and event-driven programming model. Developers could drag-and-drop controls onto forms and write code that responded to user interactions—a paradigm that remains influential today.

Delphi (1995), Borland's answer to Visual Basic, combined the power of Object Pascal with a sophisticated visual development environment. It introduced concepts like component-based development and two-way tools that remain relevant in modern frameworks.

What Made These IDEs Special

Performance and Responsiveness: These early IDEs were remarkably fast, even on hardware that would be considered primitive by today's standards. The entire Turbo Pascal IDE could load in seconds and compile thousands of lines of code almost instantly.

Integrated Everything: Unlike today's fragmented toolchains, these IDEs provided everything in one package: editor, compiler, debugger, profiler, and documentation. There was no need to configure multiple tools or manage dependencies.

Focus on Developer Experience: The user interfaces were carefully designed to minimize friction. Keyboard shortcuts were consistent and logical, and the tools "just worked" out of the box.

What We've Lost

Simplicity: Modern development environments often require extensive configuration, plugin installation, and dependency management. The early IDEs worked perfectly from the moment you installed them.

Cohesion: Today's tools are often collections of separate components loosely integrated through plugins and extensions. The early IDEs were designed as unified systems where every part worked seamlessly with every other part.

Performance Awareness: Many modern IDEs are resource-intensive, requiring gigabytes of RAM and fast processors. The early tools were masters of efficiency, delivering powerful features on limited hardware.

Learning Curve: The straightforward nature of early IDEs made them excellent learning tools. A beginner could start programming immediately without wrestling with complex configuration or toolchain setup.

Legacy and Influence

While we may have lost some of the simplicity and cohesion of those early IDEs, their influence persists. Modern development environments like Visual Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, and VS Code owe much to the innovations pioneered in the 1990s. The concepts of integrated debugging, project management, and visual design that these early tools established remain fundamental to how we develop software today.

The evolution of IDEs reflects broader trends in software development: increasing complexity, specialization, and the trade-offs between power and simplicity. As we continue to build more sophisticated tools, there's much we can learn from the elegant, focused design of the IDEs we had 30 years ago.

The prompt for this was: The IDEs we had 30 years ago ... and we lost (2023)

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