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Comment by myself248 | Hacker News Reader

For all the confused devs under age 30 in here, this is IDE meaning Integrated Drive Electronics, what later became known as ATA and then retronymmed as PATA.

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Even for devs in the late 30s, the confusion is same. First thought it was about Integrated Development Environment, was wondering what channel means here. To realise the IDE mentioned here, it took some time. :)

Kids those days. When they buy a new phone they only look at the number of megapixels /s. People who bought computers back then (except those who just wanted an expensive toy) knew what dual channel IDE is, what does it mean if a drive is master ( sorry) or slave (sorry) and what the interrupts are.

You just reminded me of the jumpers to configure master slave in IDE drives. :)

For the devs above 30 IDE could apply to Integrated Development Environment as well.

Since the context is MS-DOS, Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, Quick Basic, Quick Pascal, QBasic, Clipper, FoxPro among a few lesser ones.

Or given the Website name, Visual Age for Smalltalk, Visual Age for C++, Borland C++ for OS/2.

I'm 30+ and it actually took me some time to realise the other meaning, since I don't use IDEs (the software) much at all, but was very familiar with the IDE hardware interface from embedded systems work.

Although I am not sure about the history of the term Integrated Development Environment and its acronymisation, I don't think the early IDEs were called such --- the acronym IDE was basically exclusively used for the disk interface.

Delphi had an IDE and there were others. That's early 90s.

Did they call it that? There were IDEs of sort long before Delphi (staying with the Pascal family, even pre-Delphi Turbo Pascal sort of fits - letting you compile and run straight from the editor well back into the 80s), but most were not called an IDE.

The IDE term already pops up on Xerox PARC documentation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Development_Environmen...

You just need to dive into the Xerox Development Environment papers and documentation for the Alto (1977).

Good point. But what is a dual-channel Integrated Development Environment? ... Maybe an early form of pair programming?

EDIT: ;-)

While they were annoying to deal with, took up a lot of space, and had fixed configurations...

I do miss me some ribbon cables

I was really expecting to see a VScode plugin haha thanks

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