Microsoft Office was once distributed across 37 installation disks. Installation was time-consuming, and a read error near the end—such as on disk 30—often required restarting the entire process. 📹olivrea1908

One bad disk and the entire afternoon was gone.

The irony is that Microsoft products worked far better back then

For those too young to remember, now you see why "CD-ROMs" were such a big deal in the 1990s when they became mainstream.

i remember back in the day, we needed to switch floppy disks to see the fatality on Mortal Kombat. The game would freeze waiting for you to switch the disk, in order to show you the fatality animation😂

Back in the 90s the Office wars were : Lotus Smartsuite Perfect Office by (Borland / Novell / Corel) Microsoft Office Star Office by Sun Microsystems

This is all you needed. Word 5.1 was the GOAT.

Installed Office 4 for Macintosh System 7 today. I think it was 37 ish disks for that too. But totally worth it!

the gratification on successful installation was immense.

Mine windows 95 came on 14 disks. Office in 37 is crazy. Office 95 came on much less so don't know what this version is

The sorry part was after installing the rest of the discs if the last floppy is found to be corrupt, your done. For that reason I used to copy all floppy disks to HDD and use a batch file to install. Did same for the widows too. Good old times.

The basic installation of MacOS 4.1 took only 3 disks but Office for Mac (1.0&1,5) took far more as every application had to be installed separately. Yet fewer than in PC as mac used already double sided 800k disks.

Memories…..

I remember those days. It was such a fun time.

Yep, those were the days.

been there, done that

Yeah. I remember backing up a hard drive with 5 1/4” floppies. It seemed more a niche hobby then.

I've forgotten - could you make backup copies of every disk, or was there copy protection?

Mag a

I hated that....you get 25 disks in and accidently hit continue before youve actually inserted the disk and bam...start over...

The pain of that never leaves you..... along with modem dial up internet you had to have a lot of patience

If you did a partial install you might skip a dozen or more disks. Been there, done that, still have nightmares.

So happy I wasn’t born with these

37 disks was less than 54Mb

Obviously the procedure needed to be fixed (and eventually it was). But IMO real culprit was that larger processors/chip memory became available faster than for removable media or (pre-internet) line transfer times

Lol. I once got pirated copy of Mad Dog Mcree (piracy was legal back then in Poland). It required 143 floppies and I only had 45. So I ended up going to pirate market (yes, there was one each sunday at local school) three times to move all the files :D

Be glad. These days due to incompetent developers, an office install would take 1000+ disks.

Yeah this was a horror. I beta tested Windows through windows 8. Seriously a long and error filled slog to get the bugs out.

The good old days!

Such was life back then. Geeks had all the time in the world to restart the installation without even swearing 🤬 😂

🔥🔥

That why we stored it on the network.

Yep… A good excuse to stay in the mancave though 😎