Going back a long way here! I remember installing something from 41 floppies! Unfortunately I can’t remember what it was. At a guess it was one of the following…
Microsoft Windows 95 (early floppy based edition)
Microsoft Office.
Corel Draw (which at the time was a suite of around 7 applications)
It was a nightmare. You had to stay with your computer for the best part of a day replacing floppies.
It was an even bigger nightmare when it turned out one of the floppies near the end was corrupted. ARGH!
How many floppies did you have to install something from? And how long did it take? Tell me your stories.
I think Office clocked in at 16 or so. Never installed it from floppies mind you, I merely nicked my fathers’ ones to write over them.
My personnal white whale involves floppies though.
You see, back when I was a kid, mom and dad gave me two computer games as Christmas presents (Lords of the Realm and F-15 Strike Eagle III). Problem was : our home machine turned out to be waaaay too old and crappy to get them to run. So I read the manuals and stared at the box art, over and over and over, for maybe two years, before I finally could buy a kick-ass gaming box of my own.
Lords of the Realm was a wonderful game, completely living up to my expectations. I still fire it from time to time, for old times sake. F15 III, with its 150 pages long manual, complex avionics and gorgeous 3D landscapes ? Insert floppy E. Disk cannot be read, insert floppy E.
I still have that manual, somewhere. I never dared downloading the game from abandonware sites.
For a single product I’ll go with MS Access 2.0 for NT4. 22 floppy discs. I supported a small group (5-6 folks) that used it and constantly needed their workstations reloaded so I had to do that one many times.
Years and years ago, I recall installing WordPerfect for Windows from 10 floppies or so. That was on Windows 3.1, it was the first Windows (as opposed to DOS) port of the program. Oh WordPerfect, how I miss you.
I was very happy to get a computer with no floppy drives, never looked back. I’ll be glad to see CDs go too really, although they’re much more reliable in general.
My first PC in 1989 or so had two 1.2MB 5 1/4" floppy drives, no hard drive (couldn’t afford one.) I managed to run a lot of games that “required” a hard drive from those floppy drives.
A Data back up of about a hundred 5 1/2 inch floppies. The best thing was making the backups on rotation, and sending the floppies to a safe location then getting back the old ones to make backups on later.
Somewhere around that many and my first Win 95 purchase was floppies. Then one of them became corrupted before a year was through. At that point I got a CD and tossed the disks.
Twenty-six. I think it was some version of Office (it was a M$ product, anyway)
Worst thing - it was a computer in a lecture theatre. After I’d been going for a half an hour or so, some poor dude had to come in and give a lecture. With me sitting trying to be surreptitious in the middle of the central podium behind the desk, and him shooting me dirty looks all through the lecture for being there and putting him off.