If you’re still maintaining a VB6 payroll system or reverse-engineering a legacy MFC application, take a moment to appreciate the humble CD-ROM. It never had a server outage, it never asked you to sign in, and it never, ever deprecated your favorite function without warning.
The library was typically distributed as a two-disc set, often referred to as , with a combined size of approximately 1.1GB. Internet Archive CD1 (Setup and Samples):
If you ever find an original set in a dusty closet, keep it. Not to use—but to remind yourself how far development tools have come, and how much we owe to the quiet, spinning silver discs that held the answers before the web had them.
