Today is garbage. Best to use site search on individual known websites.
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.