Did you really use vi on DOS in 1991? I don’t remember Elvis being easy to find back then, and I don’t think it was a TSR either, so the compiler couldn’t be spawned in the background like it was with the Borland IDEs.

Almost every C bedroom programmer I knew had a cracked copy of Turbo C / Turbo C++ because they were so modern and convenient. DJGPP was a nightmare in comparison, it filled up the small HDDs of the time, created large executables, and the process of opening edit.com, leaving the editor, running gcc, and then going back to edit.com was tedious.

The few brave souls using DJGPP would usually end up running Slackware from around 1993. This was a step up from bolting an awkward POSIX runtime onto a monotasking system, as DJGPP did on DOS.

DJGPP was a stellar idea, basically the WSL / MinGW of the days, but the limitations of DOS prevented it to shine compared to the Borland IDEs.