You are not making an equal comparison. DOS at the time didn't have multiple windows or multitasking. People that don't use IDEs these days still use multiple terminals or windows.

Using the Borland C++ IDE in 1991 is way more similar to using Emacs these days, than Visual Studio Code.

The source code for Doom 3 (circa 2004) was released on Github - it was a Visual Studio solution.

http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/

FWIW, I've had an account here for 5 years (last month in fact) and am typically here for an hour or so every day and have never seen anyone make this claim.

They didn't use IDEs that consumed all of their RAM though.

What was the typical amount of RAM for PCs around 1990-1992? In 1992, I had 10MB of RAM for my Mac but that was considered a lot.

Yep, I started with Apple II and UCSD Pascal and kept using IDE since then... I can dive in the terminal and use make if needed but it feels unnatural to me.

I loved a recent quote from James Gosling regarding his love for IDEs.

He just wants to get work done, doesn't feel the need to prove anything.

Specially interesting, given XEmacs.