I have to agree.  The CD-ROM would not have helped my case at all. 
NetBSD-sparc, (along with some of the other ones like pmax) have a serious
chicken and egg problem when installing.   If I had not been fortunate enough
to have working sunos 4.1 tapes and drive, I would have been SOL.  Even with
the tapes, not being familiar with sunos disklabel at the time I had to play
games of "move the swap around the drive while I reconfigure partition sizes". 
Even more so.. had I not had an NFS connection.. I would have been completely
hosed.  How do you get the distribution to sunos?  A bootable floppy with dd
would have been *really* nice.  I could have booted up, nfs mounted the
miniroot, dd'd it to the tape, booted off tape.. whalla.  Or some other
combonation.  Imagining that install without having a local network is
frightening.

I suppose even i386 suffers from this at some point as well though..  How do
you install without DOS to download the sets?

---
Tim Rightnour    -  root@garbled.net
http://www.zynetwc.com/~garbled/garbled.html