The IDEs we had 30 years ago… And we lost

I grew up learning to program in the late 1980s / early 1990s. Back then, I did not fully comprehend what I was doing and why the tools I used were impressive given the constraints of the hardware we had. Having gained more knowledge throughout the years, it is now really fun to pick up DOSBox to re-experience those programs and compare them with our current state of affairs.

This time around, I want to look at the pure text-based IDEs that we had in that era before Windows eclipsed the PC industry. I want to do this because those IDEs had little to envy from the IDEs of today-yet it feels as if we went through a dark era where we lost most of those features for years and they are only resurfacing now.

If anything, stay for a nostalgic ride back in time and a little rant on bloat". But, more importantly, read on to gain perspective on what existed before so that you can evaluate future feature launches more critically.

Julio Merino

Fast forward to today, and the most popular text editor among programmers is a website running in Chrome in a window. No wonder most popular applications are Electron trashfires now.

Times sure have changed.