Well, even considering the world outside of a PC and Windows was probably OS/2, which I know nothing about, or the incredibly fragmented Unix world (Linux was still a wannabe) with Motif/CDE/xlib, C++ without working compilers, an infinite number of #ifdefs, (Linux) threads implemented as a userspace hack, a.out binaries, primitive TCL and Perl as the high-productivity alternatives...

Turbo Pascal/Delphi was probably nirvana.