Rough quote: "in 1984 we had at my house",

so even 41 years seems to be in the scope.

I was expecting

- early projects that ended in Visual Studio 1.0 or NetBeans soon after, (2 to 9 years too early for them)

not

- "vim (1991) was not out yet" (not-a-quote, but my feeiling upon looking at ncurses instead of floating windows)

I snickered a little because I know Visual Studio didn't have a version 1.0. Wikipedia identifies the first version as Visual Studio 97, which was at version 5.0. I remember before that there was "Microsoft Developer Studio 4.0" which came out around Windows 95, and could run on 95 or on NT 3.51. There was a Visual C++ 1.0 and a Visual Basic 1.0 released at different times. Meanwhile there were also the workhorses, Microsoft C and MASM. In those days, Borland and Watcom were real competitors to Microsoft for C and C++.

Yeah, by 1995, Visual Basic / C++, Delphi / Borland C++, and Symantec C++ were all-conquering.

A few years before, it was very different - VisualAge and Rational Application Developer were the big names in the early 90s in "professional" IDEs. Interface Builder for university spin-outs or funky startups (and SunWorks / Forte Studio for the less-funky ones). CodeWarrior on the Mac (perhaps with THINK! hanging on too). I think Softbench was popular for scientific software, but I never actually saw it myself.

And then just a few years later, the rise of Java turned things upside down again and we got Jbuilder, Visual Cafe, & NetBeans as the beginning of yet another new wave. The Visual Studio suite really began to take off around then, too.

In short, the 90s were a time of huge change and the author seems to have missed most of it!