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This process was super cumbersome since floppy disks were well on the way out even when XP was introduced and by the end of its life they were gone.

Floppy is the only universal driver the installer can count of having for storage media, besides the media it installing itself. I always thought it would be smarter if this process allowed you to insert a CD temporarily in the same drive keeping the installer in memory.

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Windows XP required a minimum of 64 MB of memory. The installer must not only fit in that space, it must be able to run at the same time. Not an impossibility, but a much taller order than running the same/a previous version of the OS directly off the disk.

I have definitely used OS installers that allowed/required CD swaps, though. Maybe Ubuntu at one point? Now that's a slick setup process. Opening Firefox to read the orange site while your OS installs on the same computer is a great trick.

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