IDE Toolkit

Room 1 of six

Green Screens

The first rooms where editor, compiler and debugger shared one window — Smalltalk-80, Emacs, vi, and the machines they ran on.

4 piecesAll six rooms

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

  • Film negatives on a light box beside camera lenses and photo-editing monitors on a desk

    All of It in One Bitmapped Window

    Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC by 1980 had an editor, a compiler and a debugger running inside a single bitmapped window — the first integrated environment in the modern sense. This piece traces what Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls built, what the interface looked like, and why it took another decade for the pattern to reach mass-market software.

  • Close-up of a silver keyboard's arrow keys and numeric keypad on a wooden desk

    Two Editors, One Year, Still Running

    Emacs (Stallman, 1976) and vi (Joy, 1976) shipped the same year from different buildings and settled into different philosophies of what an editor should be. This piece sets them side by side at their origin — not as competing preferences but as two documented answers to the same 1976 problem.

  • Row of vintage teletype machines and chairs lining a wood-paneled room with patterned floor

    The Loop That Came Before the Window

    The Read-Eval-Print Loop predates the graphical IDE by decades — Lisp machines ran it in the 1960s, and it shaped what interactive programming meant before bitmapped displays existed. This piece traces the REPL from its Lisp origins through its survival into JupyterLab and modern terminal workflows.

  • Python code on a dark screen showing a script parsing JSON event data

    When the Compiler Did Not Make You Wait

    Incremental compilation — recompiling only what changed — was the engineering argument that made an interactive IDE feel different from a batch system. This piece examines the idea in its early forms, from Interlisp in the 1970s through Turbo Pascal's single-pass compiler, naming the tradeoffs that shaped which IDEs adopted it and when.

The other rooms