Windows 3.1 was only like 7 disks.
The giant pile of floppies was Windows 95, at more than 100. And the Windows 98 upgrade CD. would ask for a random one several times during a clean install, so we had those things for a while.
As for showing my actual age, when I was a kid my dad bought an Amstrad PC1512, a mostly DOS machine with two 5.25" floppy drives and no hard drive.
But also it's a magical curse from Molag Bal.
Though the metaphysics of TES are weird enough that it's not really safe to assume anything has the same underlying cause as it would in the real world (e.g. sunlight comes from another dimension through a tear in space). So maybe all diseases are actually curses in the setting.