We had bought 40 floppy disks in a bundle, and it turns out one of them was crappy and ended corrupted. It also turned out it was the last of the set of disks for the X11 package. So we had a shiny Slackware install... without X.
Fortunately, iirc, Doom was there intact, and we could run it with the "console" svga backend (that was outside X, but before Linux had the framebuffer, I don't remember how that worked exactly)
Had to wait for the next day to re-download the corrupted image on a different floppy, and install the X11 package.
They will say computers were better then. I disagree entirely. They were horrible and had much less capacity.
I see the same thing for the Internet. People will say they miss the time when it wasn't open for commercial activity. Hogwash... I know, I was there. Content was lacking, speeds were horrible, discoverability was an arcane art, and the costs were obscene.
I'm guessing, not my domain, there is some sort of psychological reason for this sort of thing. Computers were giant, more limited, and expensive. The 'net was no better.
Even after all that, there wasn't much it could do. I'm not sure why I insisted on running that instead of Windows 95.
My only defense is that I didn't do so out of a fake memory of a glorious past. I just like tinkering.
It happens with other things. People say cars were better. Nope. Life was better. Probably not. Etc...
As of my last install of Slackware 14.1 you still have to do this.
Slackware is a wonderful distribution and keeps most important packages pretty close to up to date but Patrick seems to very much be a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" kind of developer. My first Slackware was 2.1 or 2.2 (just remember if was 1995) and other than the fact I used an ISO image of 14.1 instead of 10's of floppies the install is very much the same after all these years.
This was a minor inconvenience compared with recompiling the kernel overnight in order to add soundblaster support. (This was before modules.)
(Oh, and I learnt not to buy cheap no-name floppies, after the installation process failed several times, each at a different stage.)
A little later OSS came out. To get sound to work a lot of cases you had to shell out money for commercial sound drivers, or get a crack from #linuxwarez.
You still do with Slackware ;)
This was a minor inconvenience compared to swapping the 40 1.44mb disks needed to install it because I couldn't get it to use my pre-atapi cdrom drive correctly. Using the cdrom drive it would work for a little bit, and then everything would start timing out. And, a network install was some science fiction as far as I and my 9600bps modem were concerned.
Then once you got it all installed you could start trying to get X11 and ppp to work...