IDE Toolkit

A reference on the programming environments of 1976 to 1995.

Forty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents

Borland put an editor, a compiler and a runtime in one window and sold it for $49.95 in 1983, when a Pascal compiler was priced in the hundreds and ran as three separate programs. Anders Hejlsberg wrote the compiler. The blue screen it opened in is what a generation meant by programming.

Read the pieceRoom 2 · The Blue Box

An adult developer's hands on a mechanical keyboard at night, the face partially lit by the blue-white glow of a large monitor showing source code

Night work, and the screens as the only light in the room.

Photo: Mikhail Nilov / Pexels

A row of CRT terminals in a dimly lit 1980s computer room, screens showing green-phosphor text, with a developer visible at the nearest station

A row of terminals sharing one room — the shape of the work before one window held everything.

Photo: Viktorya Sergeeva 🫂 / Pexels

The Smalltalk-80 class browser window on a Xerox workstation, showing the four-panel hierarchical class tree with method source code at the bottom

At PARC it was already all in one bitmapped window

Alan Kay's group ran the editor, the compiler, the debugger and the class browser on the same screen, on hardware almost nobody had. Goldberg and Robson published the implementation in 1983.

Two editors written in the same year, both still running

Emacs began as TECO macros at the MIT AI Lab; vi came out of Bill Joy’s work on ex at Berkeley. Neither was an environment yet.

Then the form became the program

Visual Basic shipped in 1991 with a toolbox, a canvas and an event for every control. Delphi followed in February 1995.

Room 4 · The Inventions

The debugger stopped the program, and the program stopped being a guess

Microsoft’s CodeView arrived with Microsoft C in 1985; Turbo Pascal 5.0 put stepping, watches and breakpoints inside the editor in 1989, and the watch window has been standing furniture ever since.

Read the piece · Seven inventions

A debugger paused at a breakpoint in an early 1990s IDE, showing the highlighted line, a watch window with variable values, and the call stack panel beside it

Photo: CARTIST . / Pexels

A row of CRT terminals in a dimly lit 1980s computer room, screens showing green-phosphor text, with a developer visible at the nearest station
Green Screens

Teletype to CRT. Emacs, vi, Smalltalk-80, and editing text you could not see all of.

4 pieces
The Turbo Pascal 3.0 blue editor running on a CRT monitor, circa 1985, showing white text on the characteristic cobalt-blue background with the menu bar at the top
The Blue Box

Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and the compiler that stayed resident in RAM.

5 pieces
A Delphi 2 form designer with a TDBGrid component being positioned on a form, showing the component palette at the top and the Object Inspector panel to the right
Form Designers

Visual Basic's toolbox, Delphi's palette, and drawing the program instead of writing it.

4 pieces
A debugger paused at a breakpoint in an early 1990s IDE, showing the highlighted line, a watch window with variable values, and the call stack panel beside it
The Inventions

Highlighting, the breakpoint, completion, refactoring, the protocol.

7 pieces
An adult developer's hands on a mechanical keyboard at night, the face partially lit by the blue-white glow of a large monitor showing source code
The Builders

Hejlsberg, Stallman, Joy, Kay, Ingalls, Gamma, Dmitriev.

5 pieces
A stack of Borland product boxes — Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Delphi — photographed against a dark surface showing the period packaging design
On the Shelf

Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, Atom, VS Code, and the licences they shipped under.

5 pieces
Employees work at desktop computers in a dimly lit 1980s-style office

A software company at work: the shape Borland grew into, and then contracted out of.

Room 2 · The Blue Box

Borland, 1983 to 2009

A garage in Scotts Valley to the third-largest personal-computer software company in the world, and then the piece-by-piece loss of the developer market it had built.

Turbo Pascal, the dBase acquisition, Delphi, the price war with Microsoft, the Inprise rebrand, and the 2009 sale of the IDE business.

Read the piece · All thirty pieces

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