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I think it came with two 3.5" disks, a bootdisk and a rootdisk, as well as two CDs. One was the actual distro, the other a sunsite mirror.

At least that is what I remember and while that memory might be hazy I know exactly where my precious is.

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I definitely remember installing it off 20+ floppies onto a 386 back in the day. Most of the disks contained packages and you didn't need to install all of them though.

IIRC Emacs took up a significant number of disks

To be fair, that's pretty much an entire operating system. Just one that lacks its own kernel. It even takes a while to boot up!

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

Eight Megabytes would be a feature, these days.

Early releases of Slackware were only floppy. The boot/root CD release came later. I fondly recall wasting hours in a computer lab @ university using 20 Sun Sparcstation 2 floppy drives to write the slackware floppies for me and my friend. Walking out with a brick of floppies was pure bliss (achievement unlocked).

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