I never had MSDN before, but have just been assigned a Visual Studio Professional subscription at work (MSDN subs have been renamed to Visual Studio Professional subscriptions), and holy moly, I can still get Windows 3.1!
Yeah, those subscriptions cost big bucks… so they give you rights to use a lot of software for development only. (You’re not supposed to use it for production servers, for example.) I had one at work back in the days of Windows 95. They used to mail all that out on CD’s on a semi-monthly basis, and you’d have a big binder of discs with all the old versions, and they would supply you with the necessary activation keys.
I think I remember MSDN CDs in the dim distant past when I was student, but didn’t know it was all the software. There’s an Enterprise tier with access to a whole lot more software, but 17 of us developers just got assigned to Professional tier.