Douglas Hall diddled about and came up with:
   After a bit of experimenting witht the various formats (dd, tar, cpio etc,) it finally turns out the format of the floppies is the aix backup format.

# man -k backup
should reveal some information on the various commands for manipulating backup images and

# /etc/restore -T
on one of the OS floppies (try the first on in a series) should list the contents of the archive.

Gereon Wenzel chimes in with:
    "restore -T" does a great job listing the contents of an AIX install disk, before you dump any useless scrap to your disk.

Back to Douglas Hall:
"installp" seems to be quite happy working with an image of the disk, so you could use "dd" to extract the contents of a floppy to harddisk and install that way, e.g.:

<output copied from the 9595>
# dd if=/dev/rfd0 of=/tmp/devtoolsimage1 bs=128k
# installp -d /tmp/devtoolsimage1

000-123 Warning: Before you continue, etc.,
<snippage>
Do you want to continue with this command? (y or n)
y
Please mount volume 1 on /tmp/devtoolsimage1
...and press Enter to continue
     files restored: 1
 -

The program " Adv. Dev. Support Tools(PS2)"
will be installed.

Do you want to do this? (y/n)
<end of output copied from the 9595>

There is also an "installt" (install from tape) command which I suppose could be used to create a tape of all the various distributions quite easily. Not having a tape drive, I cannot test this :)

Install over the network is the next challenge!