The Microsoft dev tools were important for PCs, but they weren't the only game in town. Lots of people were still using Turbo Pascal and later Delphi -- there weren't a lot of tools that could generate Windows binaries yet. Some people were using DBASE, Foxpro, etc. Watcom C targeted 32-bit DOS extenders which were important for games.
The most important thing was (and still is) that you could easily integrate your the OS and UI framework of choice. Smalltalk couldn't provide that because it tried to replace all that with its own code -- which the implementor would probably further tweak into unrecognizability.
UNIX of course was its own world at this point, but it also was driven by pragmatics. You aren't going to write your MUD in Lisp if its going to thrash your swapfile, or if your friend down the hall can't hack on it with you.
It's also questionable whether these tools were "better". The one time I tried to use VisualAge all I could think about was getting back into my comfy text editor. I am hopeful however that we can eventually improve on the age-old compile/edit/debug cycle.
Most of this predates PCs and Microsoft dev tools (unless we are talking about Microsoft BASIC) by a good couple years. When Smalltalk was conceived there was no OS or GUI framework to integrate because all the OS did on a personal computer was file IO and start programs.
The most important thing was (and still is) that you could easily integrate your the OS and UI framework of choice. Smalltalk couldn't provide that because it tried to replace all that with its own code -- which the implementor would probably further tweak into unrecognizability.
UNIX of course was its own world at this point, but it also was driven by pragmatics. You aren't going to write your MUD in Lisp if its going to thrash your swapfile, or if your friend down the hall can't hack on it with you.
It's also questionable whether these tools were "better". The one time I tried to use VisualAge all I could think about was getting back into my comfy text editor. I am hopeful however that we can eventually improve on the age-old compile/edit/debug cycle.