In 2002 I decided to install Windows 95 on a black & white Win3.1-based laptop, just for the heck of it. It had a one or two hundred megabyte hard drive, but only a floppy drive for I/O, so it felt like metaphorically building a ship in a bottle. Unfortunately by the 2000s the quality of floppy disks was atrocious. I had to go through three boxes (about 75 disks) to come up with a set of 21 Windows 95 install disks that had no write or read errors.

Later I realized I could have done the job, and faster, using just two disks: one in the computer writing the disk images and one in laptop reading the disk (and then swap disks & overwrite with the next image). D'oh!

You think that's bad? Try Office 97 on 46 floppies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5o6NQmEA-8

(Yes, this was a real, official thing that was available from Microsoft)

The difference between Win 3.1 and Win 95 was really life changing. The usability of Win 95 certainly sped up adoption of the Web by non-university/govt users.

Early Linux distros downloaded via 14.4kbps modem for me. I... don’t even remember how many floppies that took. Lots as I recall.

I installed this a few times! :D