It was a pretty big market. There were word processors, spreadsheets, drawing programs, music editors, etc. Not (most?) IDEs though; their GUIs tended to be i

It was a pretty big market. There were word processors, spreadsheets, drawing programs, music editors, etc. Not (most?) IDEs though; their GUIs tended to be in text mode. There was even at least one pre-emptive multitasking system for running multiple applications at the same time (full screen) and switching between them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview Running one graphical app under DOS needed less system resources than running one under Windows, so you could get more bang for buck. Also, at that point Windows was still not great at interacting with some hardware devices in real time, so some devices needed DOS to work well.