There are many posters that complain about Borland Builder´s price tag, but what they may not realize is what Microsoft charged back then for Visual Studio C/C++ (plus the MSDN subscription fees) was likewise a lot.

You got piles of books and piles of floppy disks (later piles of CDROMs) for that.

Only recently, free development tools have become available that rival commercial offerings.

But most serious developers do not care about a few thousand dollars in tooling cost, because the main determinant of software cost is developer salaries and nothing else. Since they are typically six digit dollar amounts, the cost for tools like editors, IDEs, compilers and libraries pales in comparison or becomes a rounding error.