I definitely remember installing it off 20+ floppies onto a 386 back in the day. Most of the disks contained packages and you didn't need to install all of them though.

IIRC Emacs took up a significant number of disks

To be fair, that's pretty much an entire operating system. Just one that lacks its own kernel. It even takes a while to boot up!

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

Eight Megabytes would be a feature, these days.