That's really convoluted to simulate bad network. Here is an easy route if you are on OS X: get Apple's Network Link Conditioner [1], a System Preferences panel plugin. Once installed, tune your network to 3G Lossy and test again.
Front-end Performance: both actual and user-perceived.
Cacheability: How well dynamic and static assets cache, and are retrieved from cache. This also has an effect on performance.
None of the above has anything unique to do with testing on a floppy drive. You need a good way to simulate different network conditions, and a good inspector to check the various states on the client.
A search for "floppy disk" on newegg.com returned 52 results. There was some noise to deal with, but the most expensive drive I could find was $30. The whole process took less than five minutes. Nothing complicated whatsoever.
[1]: http://adcdownload.apple.com/Developer_Tools/hardware_io_too...