1. (interactive development environment) A suite of programs for program or application development with a common user interface, often a graphical user interface, and including software tools for code writing and editing, compilation, execution, and debugging with an easy and consistent way of moving between the various functions.

2. (integrated device electronics) A hard disk drive controller unit that resides on the drive itself, doing away with the need for a separate add-in card. It provides a method of interfacing hard disk drives to PCs using the ISA bus originally developed for the IBM PC AT in 1986. It is a system-level interface in that it makes no assumptions about the disk hardware but accepts a stream of formatted data. IDE disk drives were installed in most home PCs until 2003, when it was replaced by its successor serial ATA. IDE is now often referred to as parallel ATA (PATA). See also EIDE.