Whilst reading about this I found myself thinking back to my days as a student, writing C++ with Visual Studio 6. If you were able to install everything, inclu

Whilst reading about this I found myself thinking back to my days as a student, writing C++ with Visual Studio 6. If you were able to install everything, including the documentation, to your hard drive you never really needed anything else (which was good, because I didn't have internet access at home to begin with - too pricey). You had high quality development and debugging tools, and then in MSDN you had this absolutely exhaustive, encyclopaedic documentation that covered every possible topic in depth, and a good enough search function that you could usually find what you were looking for without too much difficulty. In some ways - not all ways - those were the days.