[donretag]

Autocomplete requires CPU cycles for the lookup and "jump to definition" requires an index to be built somewhere (CPU again, but also mem/disk space). Modern computers can handle both efficiently nowadays, but not a simple task back then.

[int_19h]

My memories of circa 1998 are rather different from OP. That's the year when Visual Basic 6 shipped, and that IDE had code completion working perfectly. Delphi 5 was out in 1999, and also worked great in that regard. Even C++ IDEs had code completion which worked decently well so long as templates weren't in the picture.

Pascal/Delphi is actually almost a perfect language to write a smart editor around: the grammar is highly regular and requires minimal lookahead to parse, and definitions always precede usage.

[memsom]

You need to remember - 1998, no Windows software was particularly "free". If you wanted to upgrade, you paid. The company I was working for was stuck at Delphi 1 (as the code was 16bit and had an in house 16bit DLL that needed to be replaced and was core to the application.) Some of the other products were on Delphi 2 or 3. Once we reengineered the DLL (it was using pure 16bit assembler to implement a look-up tree in memory, so it took them a while to make a 32bit version), we moved on. I think we were on Delphi 4 by the time I left around 2000.

Next 3 companies I worked for were using Delphi 5, despite Delphi 6, 7 and 8 existing by that point. Same reason - if it isn't broken, you don't need to jump to the next best thing.

Also worth noting - the company I directly worked for after the one above was a Borland partner in the UK and Borland outsourced training and consultancy to them (I was under Borland NDA) and we therefore had access to pretty much all the Borland software (I have a copy of the first Kylix Beta somewhere still I think)