CD drive was such a massive improvement over floppy disks, a true revolution of that time. It had/has its own problems (scratches, degradation of organic stuff inside medium over time), but compared to having games on 30 floppies, split by archives, and then seeing 17th and 24th one having bad sector or some other issue... people are often nostalgic for good ol' times, but definitely not for this stuff. I wasted so much time and nerves basically doing nothing, just watching progress bar and praying it works...

There were some self-correcting archive formats back then (.par ?) which could rebuild even damaged archives by adding only few % of size, but that wasn't my story on 386 back in 1993.

My first step before installing any MS-DOS product was to copy the software, and use the backup floppies instead of the originals, naturally this did not work with those that used strange floppy formats as copy protection.