In 1996, as a teenager, I had a ThinkPad laptop with a 486SX, 4 MB of RAM, and a 3.5" floppy drive. There was something weird about the floppy drive in that laptop that prevented stock Linux of that time from being able to work with it. But I was determined to get Slackware installed. Back then, Linux had the UMSDOS filesystem, which implemented a POSIX-capable filesystem on top of a directory tree on a DOS partition. And there was a DOS program called loadlinn that could boot into Linux from DOS. So I first installed Slackware using UMSDOS onto the DOS partition on my mother's PC, then transferred the linux directory tree from her PC to my laptop. I don't remember if I did that transfer using floppies or a null modem cable. Finally I removed the linux directory from my mother's PC. I did all of this while the rest of my family was away from home, so they never knew.

I later learned that I could add "floppy=thinkpad" to the kernel command line to enable support for the floppy drive in my ThinkPad model. Then I got brave and resized my DOS partition, using one of the free DOS-based partitioning tools available at the time, so I could have a real Linux filesystem.