An (anonymized) reply I received via personal email said:

>> Am I missing something obvious?
>A CD-ROM, like a ZIP drive are easier to move arround ;-)


Yes, you can move the little silver disk, and you can move an external
CD-rom drive.  But from what I know, most DECstations don't have
bootable (DEC) CD-rom drives. So you're left with the install media on
a mountable, _but not bootable_ media.

If you've got a bare machine that's no improvement, and if you have a
machine with some other OS (e.g. Ultrix), you can put the install
materials on the existing drive (e.g., dd the diskimage into the
Ultrix swap space.) So how does having a CD help?

I'm willing to beleive that having a CD which is non-bootable for the
majority of installers would help.  But I'd appreciate knowing *how*
it helps, because that might just let us make the install process
easier, even without the CD.

Now, if many people (or even just most of the people asking for CDs)
actually have CD drives that are bootable (i.e., can be set to
512-byte blocks), that's an entirely different kettle of fish....

So, who does, and who doesn't, have a bootable  CD-rom drive?