I have DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11, all on floppy disks.
I actually have an old Toshiba laptop that I use with it.

Your 486 with 8Mb RAM definitely WILL run Win95 - -I've actually had Win95 running on a 486SX with only 4Mb RAM.
but, just for typing, you would be better-off sticking with DOS/Win3.1*

To get your CDRom running, you can download a file called "setupd.exe"

That will, once you have DOS installed, enable you to access and run CD's on the PC.

To install Win3.1* , you MUST have DOS installed first.

You can type pretty well without windows of any sort on it, there really are some quite good DOS word processors - -hell, I even have a copy of Microsoft Works for DOS somewhere around here.

I've owned several 486's a few years back, and the HDD size of those was nearly always ubder 850Mb.

If your BIOS supports it, you will be able to install a HDD up to 6.8 Gb, but will have to use fdisk to create partitions of 2Gb or less.
You can still access the whole drive, but NOT in one big volume.

You should be able to buy a copy of DOS and Windows, if you need it, from the likes of ebay or trademe.
If you have the genuine original disks, you should be legal.

If not, you probably will not have Bill Gates knocking on your door anyway. But, in your own hands be it.

Cheers.