> - Tools for coding are miles better. Intellisense, extensible IDEs, Version control, CI/CD. True, but since projects/libraries were smaller themselves, I thi

> - Tools for coding are miles better. Intellisense, extensible IDEs, Version control, CI/CD. True, but since projects/libraries were smaller themselves, I think the overall the effort here remained roughly the same. I remember I was directly "diving in" in the header files of the major libraries I was using at the time without too much effort. Doing the same in something like Qt5 today would make my head spin. I agree about the rest. My local library at the time was completely useless, so I went by local bookshops and bought whatever titles they had on the shelves, which (looking back) was usually rather poorly written garbage. The true change for me was the discovery of early amazon, where I could buy the most obscure untranslated technical titles I wanted and get them shipped overseas at reasonable cost. Local bookshops generally didn't give a crap about my requests.