But the gpp wasn't talking about Windows help. He said documentation and Visual Studio; I presume he's talking about the MSDN CDROM that came with a VS installation. You could optionally access the docs from the CD or install it to your hard drive for speedier access.

And it was quite good. You could learn just about everything you needed to work from it, offline and from one source.

There are many things I did not like about Microsoft back then but their developer ecosystem was not one of them. Tools were expensive and closed but quite complete and well put together.

Until I learned about open source and free software I considered MSDN to be the pinnacle of how software development should be.

These days it just feels like MS can't decide between free or prosperity and so can't seem to get either one right.