None of that palaver with the first PC I used at work - ACT Sirius (with 128kB of memory IIRC) in about 1982. 2 x 5.25 inch floppy drive and no hard disk. Turn on the machine, put the MS-DOS or CP/M disk into one drive to load the OS, take out that disk, put in the disk with your program on and the disk with your data into the other drive, command line to start the program and off you go.

Taught me the benefits of backing up very early in the piece when I wiped a floppy that contained several weeks of data.

My first PC was the Amstrad 1512, only had 5-1/4" floppies, reinstaling Windows back then was a nightmare 🤕dial-up internet was just as fun, the youngsters these days don't know what they missed 🤣🤣

I remember the Amstrad, had a strange size disk, I have one here, not sure where it came from. I think it's something to do with my brother when he was some training thing many years ago.
I don't even know if it came from a PC or a PCW.

I would love to have space and time to muck around old computers.

The 5-1/4" floppy was common back then, it's where the name Floppy came from because they were so thin they just flopped around. I think it took a year at least before the hard cased 3-1/2" one came into being along with CD drives being added.

Not forgetting the even larger and floppier original 8 inch disk.

Hahaha, yes but they were only used in organisations, I never actually came across any when working with GPO International Telecommunications or when I was working with Teleprinters (Telex)

Quite a few hobby computers, eg the Altair 8800, used 8 inch floppy disks in the early days. That was before 5 1/4" disks were invented.

I had many a person ask me why a 3.5" disc was called "floppy". I took great joy in ripping them apart to show them that the disc inside the hard case was indeed "floppy". It was the storage medium itself that was floppy, the case was just for protection and went from flexible to rigid.

And then if you can show them the platters in an old hard drive then it reinforces why one is called floppy and the other hard.

Mine was a 1640 and it didn't have a hard drive at all so there was no "install windows" - everything ran from floppy disc.

Working on setting up PCs for a reasonably large business you could spend many hours with a load of PCs setup and just feeding floppy discs in to install DOS, drivers, Windows, Office applications (back then Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect) and the like. Had production lines and you would just start at one end and just cycle the discs down the line as the next disc was needed for each machine.

Those were the days.