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Comment by leemailll | Hacker News Reader

Believe it or not, my win95 copy came with both 3.5 floppy disks and a cd. my computer that time had a cdrom but I tried to install it with floppy disks, and failed miserably around the thirties or something. At that time there was a joke why MS named it win95 not something else.

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If it was a retail copy of W95 with both the 3.5" disks and a CD-ROM, it also included a little receipt you could mail in to Microsoft so you could swap your 3.5" disks for 1.2 MB 5.25" ones. Just in case you were insane enough to try and install it on a machine only with 5.25" drives.

And people with 8" floppy drives were just out of luck.

Are you sure you aren’t thinking about Office? The last version came on 55 floppies

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/tn-archiv...

Can confirm the OS did as well (win 95). It was a hard install on my notebook which lacked a cd drive. So many floppies.

Same here, floppies and failures!

I ended up taking the notebook (a Dell Latitude with 810MB of hard disk) to a friends where we managed to install from a network mounted CD via the parallel port IIRC.

I bought a version of Novell Unixware back in the early 1990s that had even more floppies, 63 of 'em, IIRC.

I tried to short-circuit that long-winded installation by putting the last 50 or so on to a QIC tape-cassette. Most of the time that worked, sometimes it didn't.

It definitely came packaged this way in Australia. I can confirm OP's story.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1995-Microsoft-Windows-Upgrade-for-...

I have not so great memories of constantly reinstalling windows via floppy.

Swapping disks getS old quick

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