> In fairness you didn't just get the development tools, you also got copies of just about every MS server and office product on what were fairly generous developer licenses.
It didn't start out that way... they added a premium level later, and that was the version that included all the free tooling. I still have volumes 3 and 5 (April 1993 and Fall 1993), and it's a single CD product that was mostly focused on just the documentation. (This is actually how I got my first CD-ROM drive... IIRC, the whole package, a one year subscription and a proprietary interface CD-ROM was $400).
It didn't start out that way... they added a premium level later, and that was the version that included all the free tooling. I still have volumes 3 and 5 (April 1993 and Fall 1993), and it's a single CD product that was mostly focused on just the documentation. (This is actually how I got my first CD-ROM drive... IIRC, the whole package, a one year subscription and a proprietary interface CD-ROM was $400).