baobun parent
You must have been in an interesting place if floppies was more limiting than bandwidth... Splitting the installer across multiple floppies would be more common for initial install I believe and you would only fill up to ∼2/h on great dialup.
I, at least, did Linux installs by downloading the floppy images to my campus account overnight and walking to the computer labs on campus to write them to disks (they had some NeXTstations that had floppy drives).
Can't edit so replying to myself. The campus itself used a 56k leased line for internet (1993-4) and their dialup pool of eight (!) modems for ~3000 students ran at 2400 bps. It was far faster to walk over to the labs with a stack of disks.
They were almost never all busy. Then in summer of '95 or so, they installed 100 Mbps Ethernet.
That was a big jump. And security was a huge afterthought at the time; many, many people shared their entire hard drive with no password. If only it had been a few years later with MP3's and affordable CD burners...