> They didn't provide a compiler - hell, they changed you for it - until the MSDN happened around 2000, development material was sparse and expensive (compared

> They didn't provide a compiler - hell, they changed you for it - until the MSDN happened around 2000, development material was sparse and expensive (compared to man pages existing for 30 years before that). It looks like you're talking about the UNIX tools that existed for "30 years before" the year 2000. The problem with that kind of thinking is that for most of this period, those UNIX tools required a $50,000 minicomputer or a $5,000 workstation to run them on. In comparison, the PC made it much cheaper to get access to programming tools -- even when you add in the cost to buy a C compiler separately. It was only when commodity PCs running Linux took over the UNIX world, in the late 1990s, that those man pages actually became cheap.