Comment by jdriselvato | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdriselvato | Hacker News Reader

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You have to remember that there was a time when phone lines and internet connections shared resources. Also, the internet wasn't nearly as fast as it is now, even a decade ago, so printing meant you had that copy locally without needing to wait for load times.

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.

I too had printed copies of web pages (mostly cheats and guides for games that you simply couldn't access while a game was running!) but if I were to print out entire forum discussions, my parents would've killed me for using so much precious printer ink (and paper, probably).

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.

Back in the day a lot of video games had lore that was either made up or told telephone style. There wasn't exactly wikis on a lot of information to tell truth from fact.

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.

I printed forum threads on OS installation/dual booting/BIOS stuff that I might need not having a phone with web access or another computer.

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.

If you don't have internet access at home, then you have limited options. You could save them to disk and hope they display OK at home. But this forces you to sit at the computer to read them, and assumes you actually have a computer at home.

Alternatively, you could print them out.

Also in the pre-broadband era internet was commonly charged by the minute. Printing stuff out allowed you to read it in your own time without a ticking clock.

Of course you could save pages, or even print to PDF (after installing ghostscript). But that's nowhere near as comfortable to read

There was software for various different types of forums that was specifically designed to go online, download anything new, upload anything you composed online, and log off. Even if you weren’t getting charged by the minute by the BBS, you might have been getting charged $1 per minute by the phone company.

I felt like the PDF format must’ve been newer than the old dialup times, but it was released in 1993… TIL!

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