You have to jump through a bunch of hoops, if you even know about what's there. You have to make sure the right thing is registered in the right way, and if something's broken down in the link between your university's login setup and MS's setup then good luck getting someone to fix it as a student. It's actually a huge difference in practice from what you get with open-source (or piracy): download the thing and run it, that's it.

No, not really. I remember it being dead simple when I was there.

It's a pointless argument. You had access to all the software with a regular student license, it was obviously never meant for any production workload and never meant to be covered with any kind of support.

Since piracy was/is the norm, you might as well provide a few version.

I remember the process as 1) Submit my .edu email 2) Click link in email 3) Pay $50 4) Get keys to ALL the things.

All you need(ed) was an e-mail address that ended in @myuniversity.tld and use that in the registration at the shop.

Yeah, we had access to DreamSpark around 10-15 years ago and it was pretty awesome.

I was very much a Linux person at the time, but I could still appreciate all the free stuff MS lobbed at students.