[pjmlp]

I was writing code in the 90's, and my first IDE was Turbo Basic in 1990 precisely, followed by Turbo Pascal alongside Turbo Vision and Object Windows Library.

Eventually I also got into Turbo C, Turbo C++, and then upgraded myself into Borland C++, used Visual Basic 3.0 in 1994, and a couple of years later Visual C++ 5.0 was my first MS C++ IDE.

Mac OS MPW was an IDE and stuff like AMOS and DevPac were IDEs as well.

Java IDEs started to show up around 1998, like Visual Cafe and the first Eclipse, after being ported from IBM's Visual Age.

Visual Age, which were the IDEs for Smalltalk and C++ from IBM for OS/2 and Aix.

The only group that wasn't using IDEs were the UNIX folks, thankfully XEmacs was around to bring some back sanity when I had to code in UNIX.

[hardwaregeek]

I'm curious about these early IDEs. My knowledge of 90's programming is solely from secondary sources. What features did they have? Did they do stuff like automatic renaming or goto definition? Were those features done syntactically or semantically? How fast were they? A common complaint I've read is that people could type faster than an IDE could keep up, which is something I rarely encounter these days.