>>>>The Windows SDK today is still huge. The download for the Vista version is over a Gig...and that's compressed. I didn't install the whole thing so I can't say how big it expands, but my install is at 1.26 Gig.
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>>>When I remember that VAX OS documentation took only about 1.5 meters of shelf space (and that I actually had the time to read most of it)... and it was still something fitting one brain. With Windows, I doubt anyone knows everything.
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>>I took a DEC VMS device driver course and had a few questions for the instructor. He knew exactly where to go in the micro fiche files to find the area of the source code we needed to look at. That was 30,000 sheets of micro fiche, with 12 printed pages per sheet. Amazing!
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>aaah yes, those were the days. I actually had time to read most of that VAX OS documentation also....I was the DCL master guru there for a while - even had some guys from DEC fly out to see what we'd done with it...haha That was back in the eairly 90's - I even got a call from them in 1999 asking if the stuff we did was y2k compliant (which it was)....they're actually still running a bunch of the stuff we wrote back then.

DCL was pretty cool. We worked on several different kinds of mini-computers that had front panel switches for viewing/modifying memory addreses, ports, etc., and there was no such thing on a VAX. So I wrote a "front panel" app in DCL so we could do those kinds of things. Pretty nifty!