> At the time, CD-ROMs spun at slower speeds with data transfer rates of below 1 megabyte, which made the CD-ROM less useful than it might have been in later it

> At the time, CD-ROMs spun at slower speeds with data transfer rates of below 1 megabyte, which made the CD-ROM less useful than it might have been in later iterations. It's all relative, I suppose. Around the same time I had Debian (server) installation that took up less than 40 MB of storage. Nowadays, the kernel itself is larger than that. Those "slow" CD-ROMs were still an order of magnitude or more faster than the most common alternative, floppy disks, by the way. Not to mention that floppy disks were notoriously unreliable. It was always a challenge to find enough working floppies to be able to install the "A" and "N" disk sets required to get a (minimally working) Slackware box up and running! I think the first CD-ROM drive that I personally owned was a "4x" drive which, if memory serves, would have been ~600 kB/s. A "standard" 3.5" (1.44 MB) floppy drive might have been able to read data at, what, maybe 25 kB/s at the most? Nowadays, when I boot a live CD it's almost always over the network (via PXE) -- at 10 or 40 Gbps -- and the entire thing gets copied into RAM before being launched... It's interesting to think about but it's impossible to imagine how many of today's "hard (upper) limits" -- and which ones -- will seem absurd and completely miniscule in another 25 years or so.