I don't understand it, myself. The small size of DOS and its utilities make it look, in a word, trivial to me. I've read about the early days of Microsoft and how they struggled to get DOS finished, and from the perspective of today am more or less baffled.
A part of the problem was they wrote in assembler. Today, I would not write it in assembler. I'd write it in C (or DasBetterC!) and get it all complete and debugged. Then, I'd hand translate it to asm. I expect this would go 10x faster.
I'd also develop it on a Unix computer, using an emulator to debug it, much like how Gates/Alan developed Basic. (That was a really smart move by those two.)
I don't use IDEs myself, but git is an absolute game changer.
A part of the problem was they wrote in assembler. Today, I would not write it in assembler. I'd write it in C (or DasBetterC!) and get it all complete and debugged. Then, I'd hand translate it to asm. I expect this would go 10x faster.
I'd also develop it on a Unix computer, using an emulator to debug it, much like how Gates/Alan developed Basic. (That was a really smart move by those two.)
I don't use IDEs myself, but git is an absolute game changer.