semi-interesting item procured from ebay

[tipc]

A nearly 20 CD set of M$ "Licensing" material. Office 2000, Visual Studio 6.0 Pro (12 disks). A few other spurious items. Pretty groovy if you ask me. I've had elements of VS before, and not so kosher copies. But now I have the real thing.

These things were issued at Devry apparently as the Logo is on each CD. I suppose that constitutes an (expired) student license. Keys are included. And possibly non transferable. Like anyone is going to check.

Some licensing products don't even require a key. I have several disks consisting of W2k pro, W2k Advanced server, and used to have, strangely, a 2 disk version of W2k server. The previous 2 are cd's unless I'm mistaken, so I'm not sure why strait server required 2 disks. None of these require keys. They just install. The good old days.

[Chuck(G)]

Many MSDN versions were provided with the keys already present in the product. XP was a bit different in that it came with a sheet listing keys. Later versions of the XP MSDN DVD had the keys printed on the CD label.

[tipc]

may I ask specifically what you mean by MSDN version? Is it labelled as such?

[Chuck(G)]

Yes--the CDs were identified as "Microsoft Developer Network" or "Microsoft Developer Library" and were part of a subscription service by Microsoft started back in the 1990s. I think the earliest CDs that I have are somewhere around 1994. It included MS technical publications, DDKs, SDKs, various platforms and operating systems, initially in a wide variety of languages. Later, the "International Version" was split off as an option. Lots and lots of CDs/DVDs.

I dropped out sometime after XP--I wasn't getting enough return for my $1500 yearly subscription.