Late 90's here. There are two things I miss: 1. Going to the book store and looking through the (mostly) O'Reilly books to see what there is to learn or what new technologies are coming out. 2. Having a huge pile of 3.5" floppies (or even CDs) you are using to load the latest version of Visual studio or whatever and just imagining how much knowledge is contained in those. I think my copy of VC++ was something like 21 floppies.