believe it or not, people still use floppies all the time. my current favorite way to install <a href='
http://www.debian.org">debian</a>, for instance, is via floppy for base system (takes 5 floppies) and high-speed network for the rest of the system. takes three hours, start to finish, including the time it takes to download helix gnome. alas, not for the faint of bandwidth. note that while three hours may seem like a long time, only the first 15 and last 10 is attended. the rest is mostly downloading, so if you're sitting on a T1 network, it probably wouldn't even take that long.