Back in the day Debian had a network installer that was two or three
floppies. The floppies were enough to boot and get connected to the
internet, then the rest of the installer and packages would be
downloaded. This was back in 1996-1999 time frame, and I remember
doing an install or two over a dial up connection. Talk about being
ahead of the times... ;)

In the age of broadband this seems like the way to go. The exception
being LiveCDs/DVDs that allow you to demo the OS and software without
making changes. Downloading the entire install media is only needed if
you're doing an offline install or in a time crunch on a slower
connection and can't wait for downloads.

Nobody needs everything that is on the physical install media, and in
most cases you can't install everything on the media due to package
conflicts. Network install and only downloading the packages needed
seems to be a far superior solution for operating systems and software
distributed over the internet to me.

-- 
Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us
IT Outhouse Blog Thing | http://www.itouthouse.com