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Comment by hermitdev | Hacker News Reader

I know I've installed Win95 off of floppies. Don't recall the exact number, but believe it was around 40-50 3.5" floppies. It came in a box about the length of a shoe box.

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OS/2 Warp was 40 or so floppies, and sold at such a discount that buying a copy was the cheapest way I knew to get high quality floppies when I was in college

This was brilliant

I remember in college seeing a LOT of OS2/Warp floppies, but I never saw any machines running them.

Now I know why.

It was 13. I only remember because that was when I first started learning about computers, and I needed them many times. My Mom loved me.

I have somehow never gotten around to throwing away the box of ancient floppies I've got in a closet from ages ago, and the Windows 95b (OSR2) installation disks I made were still in it, complete with custom color printed labels I splurged on.

https://i.imgur.com/iVNVleR.jpg

The media I copied from took up 28x 3.5" HD floppy disks. It's possible they were copied from what was originally a CD-ROM. I don't remember clearly anymore.

Note: I'm not trying to refute or correct your 13-disk figure, which was clearly a different installation set, and likely original Windows 95 rather than my OSR2, which came out around 1997.

Hrmm. Seems you're right and my memory is way fuzzier than I thought. Raymond Chen also says 13 [0]. Maybe it was just my existential dread of one of the floppies having gone bad that makes me think it was more.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050819-10/?p=34....

I think Photoshop was around 22 floppies, but things from that time period are quite fuzzy

I think it was closer to 15-20, but then you had a service pack update which was another 10.

Edit: just checked in Google. Win95 was just 13 floppies. But you had MS Office and other software that was additional floppies to install.

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