Comment by musicale

DOS IDEs (Turbo Pascal etc.) do seem pretty great, but they wouldn't help you build GUI apps the way you could with VB, Delphi (a successor to Turbo Pascal), Java, etc. Tcl/Tk is also a product of the 1990s, both open source and commercial, which made GUI app development faster and easier, though I am not sure if it had a good IDE.

(I think we're indebted to Sun for wasting money on things like Java and Tcl/Tk, projects that weren't closely related to their core business but which benefited the rest of the industry.)

Most of the things you mention are also products of the 1990s, providing additional evidence for the claim that software advanced quite a bit on both the proprietary and free software sides during that decade.