Yup I remember doing a boot/root floppies with Slackware as late as the
early 2000s on an IBM PS/2 Model 95.

On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 7:29 PM Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:

> On 8/9/19 6:23 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> > In '95, Slackware started releasing on CD-ROM's, and while there may
> > have been boot/root floppies, I suspect more and more they were used as
> > rescue media, since installing from a CD-ROM was *way* more convenient.
>
> The boot & root floppies were how you booted Slackware for a long time.
> The CD-ROM was unbootable for quite a while.  You booted off of floppy
> and the installation scripts would ask you which drive had the CD-ROM in
> it to mount and install from.
>
> > I'm guesing what you were doing was creating a kernel plus initramfs
> > which was sufficient to mount a root file system elsewhere as an
> > emergency "boot this failsafe kernel off the floppy", perhaps?
> > I don't think a kernel+initramfs on a single 1.44MB floppy would
> > have been sufficient for use as an install medium by '99.  Or were
> > you making an emergency USB thumb-drive as a rescue device, maybe?
>
> It was a re-roll of the above boot & root disk set.  It was not rescue
> media per-say.  Though the standard boot & root disk set did get used
> for rescue purposes in addition to installation.
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>
>