Probably I should apologize for bothering everyone with my problems. Thanks again for your patience.
The easiest way for me to get debian materials is to log on to a unix mainframe and copy things as files onto floppies, which I then can copy to my home computer and unzip, dd, or rawrite as necessary. I think I will be able to process the bootdisk and rootdisk in this way, although I have not yet tried it. The base files, as uncompressed images, are going to be more of a nuisance. I tried looking in the /dev section of the mainframe. Although the terminal I use has a floppy drive, there is no /dev/fd0. I suspect there may be a way of doing the equivalent of the dd command, but I'm going to have to get some local help. Anyway, is there a reason why the base things are not compressed in the same way that bootdisk and rootdisk are?
