My first Linux distro was SLS, sporting Linux kernel version 0.99pl12, and it came on 15 5.25in floppies. I only had Usenet at the time, so I wasn't able to download it directly, and had to pay some random person to mail me the floppies.

I was then setting up my own little TCP/IP network with a NFS server on my two machines, connected via coax Ethernet using NE2000 network cards.

Thank goodness for CD-ROMs. Only a few years after that, I was able to just go into a computer store and just buy a single CD with Yggdrasil (or RH or Slackware) which made the whole process much easier. As long as your system could boot off of CD-ROM... sometimes you still needed to make a boot disk.

I had a friend that only used two floppies... one installing on a new computer, the other downloading the next disk... (isdn line) It actually worked out pretty well.

My first modem was 2.4kbps. Thankfully google didn't exist back then