Slackware came with two 3.5" disks a boot disk and root disk. The root disk contained the root filesystem, he boot disk the kernel. At that time the kernel fit onto a single 3.5", 1.44 MiB floppy disk.
http://downloads.lede-project.org/releases/17.01.4/targets/i...
That's how I learned the whole boot chain diagram - hands on, trial and error.
Cramping linux onto a floppy has been a challenge for as long as i use linux.
I had to copy the tarballs into the MS-DOS partition, boot with those floppies you mention, and then at a given moment give the path to that directory.