Well I finally solved the "man" problem. Thanks to all that replied (esp. to Paul Smith and Ron Rademaker who gave this newbie some great tips on commands to use while installing via floppy). Folks it is possible to install via floppy but, as the manual does say, it is NOT recommended. You have to download man from the debian ftp site or mirror sites, save it onto floppy, transfer it to the linux machine and then install it. Aside from this program, you also need to download and install groff and jgroff (however, when I installed jgroff, it replaced groff ! ).
I have no choice right now but to use floppies as the machine I'm using for Debian is an ancient 486 with no cd-rom, no internet capabilities, a whopping 16 megs of ram, and an astounding 268 megs of hd space =P. Debian does run well on it though. I am using a b&w G3 with a high speed connection to download all the files and so far I've kept my sanity. The upswing to all this is I got a chance to actually play around with the commands on Linux, learn how to install basic packages, and get some new life into an old machine. If you want to learn linux via a baptism of fire, do it the way I did. thanks again at