A question from someone a bit younger:
What was the purpose of printing out online discussions? Was it to read them while not at the computer? Was it to physically archive them?
What was the purpose of printing out online discussions? Was it to read them while not at the computer? Was it to physically archive them?
I have a couple of GameFAQs discussions and cheat lists for various PS2/GameCube games from the early 2000s. They're stowed in a folder because it was a hassle to run between the family room and my bedroom when referencing.
Also, for the longest time, a household shared a single computer. So printing off the pages meant I didn't need to compete between family members for computer use.
Edit: A friend just reminded me of navigating in the passenger seat with a stack of Mapquest prints.
Edit-2: If anyone wants to relive this in the modern world, print to PDF blog posts, news articles, etc., and store them on your Kindle (or equivalent). You'll notice you'll comprehend the article way better than on your phone or laptop.
Of course you could save pages, or even print to PDF (after installing ghostscript). But that's nowhere near as comfortable to read
So while I understand the need for printing out stuff back then, I'm a bit puzzled why someone would print out forum discussions per se.
Alternatively, you could print them out.
So printing out the discussion allowed you to learn how to accomplish certain things or unlock certain items doing weird gamepad movement, even if it was false.
See Mew in Pokemon Y/B/R and the SS Anne truck: https://gaming-urban-legends.fandom.com/wiki/Mew_Under_the_T...
All you need is some troll posting how it worked for them, and you'd print out their instructions along with someone else who said they got it working the same way with a +1 step, and you're printing off the entire discussion, trying to get a Mew before school the next day to no avail.
My Dad wasn't going to let me hogging the family computer for hours playing on my gameboy for no reason.
That's quite specific, but just one example. I think we could imagine a scenario where you might have printed any instructional thread. The interview transcriptions mentioned could've been for offline interview prep.
They did, but FWIW, they were very small and fairly expensive compared to contemporary times. The attitude towards using disk space was a bit different back then, because it was a much scarcer and more valuable resource.
Absolutely. Back in that era printing things was just "what you did" if you wanted some combination of permanent / portable / offline accessible. FSM only knows how many trees I am responsible for killing back in the day, printing stuff that I would never bother printing now. But over time we got more comfortable with not needing everything on paper, and so now...
> It still boggles my mind a bit when people say they don’t have a printer at home
... I am one of those people. I don't own a printer and rarely print anything. On the infrequent occasions when I do want paper copy of something, I just send it to a nearby Fedex Store or UPS Store and have it printed there.
I DID give up on quality inkjet photo printers. That I’ll just send out to some online printer. Which I rarely do; I only have so much wall space.
But yeah, for people who are much further away from a printing location or who print more frequently, it would definitely still make sense to have a home printer.
I mean, that's more than enough for text downloaded from a usenet group. Printing that much plaintext out would be something.
In mid-late 90s central Texas, a well-off family might have had one PC and a second phone line shared between Internet access and the kids, as well as a dot matrix printer or even an inkjet (ink was a LOT cheaper back then), but only the most indulged (or nerdy, spending their savings on that instead of driving expenses) kids would have had their own PCs.
Saving locally to a desktop computer surely existed back then, I even did it myself sometimes.
I was just pointing out that saving locally (the original question) has nothing to do with googling about laptops and smartphones (the condescending reply).
I accessed Usenet from my university, printed it very cheaply, and brought it home.
My home PC didn't have any internet connection until a couple of years later when I could afford a 9600bps modem.
As to diskdrives, when I started our uni-workstations could'nt read a dos/win3.1 disk
Doing a lot of reading on that was rough on the eyes and you were scrolling constantly. I printed a lot back then.
Take for example the fact that (testing with a 150kb block of lorem ipsum text) you could easily squeeze the text capacity of a 3.5mm floppy into around 20 pages of physical text. 10 sheets of double-side printed paper and some ink might well have been cheaper than the floppy it would be intended to replace.
Unfortunately I was unable to find any good resources on the cost-per-page of printing back in the day. So I can't really put hard numbers to this. Printing is incredibly cheap now (for text at least, printing photos uses so much ink) and I can't imagine it was all that more expensive back when most work people did still relied on printing off documents and hand signing them. (physical bill printing, checks, physical contract signing, etc.)
Of course this is all speculation on my part, I was too young to care about money and how much things cost back when the my household had floppy disks and printed things off regularly. If someone has a better memory of the time I would really be interested to hear from someone who did pay attention to those things.
Early laser printers were very expensive for the printer but the toner was relatively cheap, and a ream of paper wasn't that expensive, either.
Heck, even if you could save it locally, you might have only had a 500MB hard drive, it seems weird now because with TB drives, unless you are saving games/media, you have almost unlimited storage.
I mean that was already a massive amount of storage for plain text.
> you could easily download an entire floppy disk in a minute or two
And how does printing it on paper help with that? If anything, switching out the floppies and carrying them home is faster and easier than with hundreds (or thousands) of pages.
But I get your overall point of transferring the content home.
We were all used to reading text on paper in a much nicer format back then.
The typical text/graphic display of the day was about 36" * 24" and delivered daily on your doorstep for about $0.50 plus tip.
Printout wasn't as nice, but you could mark it up, and scroll was intuitive, as was copy and paste.
They are overpriced, but try reading a newspaper once... It's a completely different experience. You have no idea how nice it felt to have the Sunday newspaper and time to soak it in.
It was well written, and had no spam in it.
Today is garbage. Best to use site search on individual known websites.
Primarily to read them offline. These messages were usually part of usenet, or in emails lists, or held on (remote) servces like Mono at Imperial. You could read them on the HP-UX systems, via a dumb terminal, which were connected to the Internet, but not connected to a PC with a disk drive. (Well, there were a few PCs and Mac classics around, but not enough for everyone and - as an Amiga fan - there wasn't yet CrossDos to let me use compatible disks.)
Some items, like early drafts of the Star Wars scripts, I did print for archival purposes as I (foolishly) thought that they'd be spotted and taken down by the copyright police, and lost forever!
Spoiler alert: This was all around 1991
Imagine the pyramid: the amount of time user was interactively connected to some network service — the amount of time user was in front of (any) computer system — the rest of life activities.
Fully featured mail clients, news clients, FidoNet clients had many options to quickly mark message chains for download or export, and deal with them offline later. You could even dump all those updates to a floppy, give it to a modem-less user, then transfer replies for upload through the same “floppynet”. Communities also collected all kinds of FAQs for users to grab first and study offline before wasting time.
Similar solutions were needed for periods spent away from keyboard. If you were on a trip in a different city, you would have all the directions printed or simply written down instead of taking the computer with you.
Some documents were simply more usable when printed than when displayed screen-by-screen in text mode or low resolution. Some services/protocols did not implement live text search, and a glance at paper copy could be easier and faster. Later example of server-side state updates over slow channel is the existence of dedicated normal and print modes in old forum software. By default, a small number of messages is shown on each page to prevent long wait times for each page on dial-up. People who are sure they want to save or print the whole thread can choose much longer page that lacks online-oriented design features.
Sometimes I'd also bring it along as reading material in a car ride etc...
There were also some games that didn't cope well with switching between fullscreen and desktop, so printed material helped there too!
Typically an internet user would dial out with their physical phone line which was often also their home phone line (no mobile data).
A lot of internet service providers back then charged by the minute or hour to connect.
Collecting posts could let you collect more to read them offline.
Printing in general was more common (easy way to share with ppl who weren’t online) and a better reading experience than reading them on screen because the screen resolutions were still pretty low.
Reading at the desk was ok, but your CRT monitor was often low res and somewhat flickery (depending how sensitive to that you are).
Laptops (once they existed) had hilariously short battery life and dismal lcd based screens. I wouldn't recommend it.
I think I stopped printing stuff out pretty much exactly when laptops got good enough to use instead.
I mean.... likely more than "a bit" younger :)
1. Computer not always available. A lot of the time it could be a "Family Computer". Not "Personal Computer".
2. There were far more detailed discussions than today, but computer are not portable so you want to read it may be while you are in bed.
3. Access information has a cost. Not only does it take time on a dial up modem. Transfer ( In terms of Data / bytes ) isn't free and depending on settings / locations / plan you could be paying for it per visit.
That is from someone who used to print a lot of internet out in university.