I used to use my university's labs to download early versions of Linux onto 1.44MB floppies, starting at around 20ish floppies in the early days to 40ish by the time I left university.
Unfortunately, the labs at the time were filled with Macs (the non-compsci 'general' labs that is, the compsci ones had Sun workstations), which could write to a PC-format 1.44 drive, but it'd take many times longer than Mac-formatted floppies. Something like 10-minutes per disk.
So, I'd spend all day downloading then copying to 20-40 floppies, take them home, and often 80% of the way through the installation there'd be a corrupt floppy. Grrrr.
So I'd have to go back, rinse-repeat the entire process - until I had the lightbulb moment of leaving the download on the Mac instead of deleting it, and only having to re-copy the failed disk. But this had its problems too, as it was a local copy on the Mac, so I'd hang about, looking all suspicious, until whoever was using 'my' Mac would leave and rushing over to grab it before anyone else did, hoping n-one had needed the space themselves and deleted it all.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
