stacks of diskettes, for every operating system.
would routinely spend hours doing an install only to hit a block and have to reinstall DOS to have modem access to get help on usenet. Then hours of reinstalling to move forward and repeat on another issue.
I really loved it though, it was a massive upgrade over DOS and windows on a 286.
it took me a year of contacting every site that threw my personal info up on google and a few had to be contacted multiple times but i was able to scrub 99% of my presence on the google serps anyway with this method.
It definitely should be easier.