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.
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.
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.
Ah, memories of printing out the entire DooM FAQ because reading it on a small screen was annoying and not always available, other people needed to use the computer, too.
It took time to access the information. You had to turn on your modem and connect to the internet (took a while). Then you had to load up the information (took a while). Then there was the lack of good search engines, so you were worried you'd never find the information again. And most importantly, you couldn't pull up this information while out and about (there was no 3g/4g/5g).
"Lack of good search engines" could also once again be said about the current state of SEO hijacking. There was a good 10 year period (I guess around 2000-2010 give or take) where you could truly find useful stuff via search.
Today is garbage. Best to use site search on individual known websites.
Reading it on the go was a lot of it. Most of the things of the things I printed out at the time was because i wanted read it on the way to or from school.
We had tiny low resolution CRT displays back then, 640*480 pixels, 9" or so. 8*8 pixel fonts suck.
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.
I do wonder about the relative cost of paper to digital storage mediums of the time. It could be that would have something to do with it.
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.
Printing was mostly about the cost of paper (and the amortized cost of the printer). Dot matrix ribbons were very cheap. Without deeply diving into them vs. now printer costs I’m guessing that dot matrix then vs. B&W laser now were similar in inflation-adjusted dollars and inkjets today probably actually cost more.
I printed out guitar tabs, source code, tech notes, jokes, etc so I could look at them in my room at my leisure. The family computer was in the office/computer room and was used by 3 or 4 people. If my sister was doing her homework, that took priority over reading 100 Jeff Foxworthy jokes.
Very often you could be using a 'fast' internet connection (T1 at school, library), and you could easily download an entire floppy disk in a minute or two. And it was unlikely you had a CD-RW drive (maaaybe a Zip disk), so it'd be hard to take it home and you wouldn't be able to save it locally.
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.
Printing stuff at school/work made it really easy to read stuff when you didn't have a computer at home. Besides the fact computers had fewer resources all around, personal ownership of computers was still a minority at the time. A floppy disk could store a bunch of text files but didn't do you a lot of good if you didn't have a computer at home.
Other folks have mentioned several other reasons, I'll just mention screen tech. My first monitor (bought in '93) was a 640x480 pixel 13" CRT screen. (And that was expensive - the Mac Classic had 512 × 342 mono, pretty comparable to the Apple Watch.)
Doing a lot of reading on that was rough on the eyes and you were scrolling constantly. I printed a lot back then.
I was just pointing out that saving locally (the original question) has nothing to do with googling about laptops and smartphones (the condescending reply).
Which were connected to the very expensive machine that a whole household shared.
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.
They did but were rather small and unreliable - for instance around 300-500 MB and could easily die. People printed stuff for the same reason books exist - storage and mobility, neither of which were easily available. I used to print source code just to review in silence. Might print backup emails to ensure durability.
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.
Furthermore, there was probably more of a reflexive printing things out at that point which took a long time to break. I certainly downloaded BBS and Usenet forums to read offline on my computer but a lot of us printed a lot of stuff out on a daily basis. It still boggles my mind a bit when people say they don’t have a printer at home because there’s a lot of info like trip itineraries I want in hardcopy.
There was also no one way to store information. Some people still had floppy disks, then the smaller hard disks, then CD ROM -- it was all over the place.
Saving it locally wasn't as viable as it is today due to smaller storage drive sizes. Previously everything was printed out (or typed out via typewriter) and that was a norm for society for a long time.
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!
To generalize, systems (and local networks) were not constantly connected. Even “internet-connected” could mean just the ability to exchange data when requested by user or at regular intervals with some other system, maybe even only over certain protocols (like mail), instead of “always online”.
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.
I remember printing out walkthroughs, cheat codes, game weapon/monster descriptions and level editor tutorials from the one dialup-internet connected computer in the house to be able to use them at the not-internet-connected gaming computer upstairs
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!
During those years there was no high speed internet for most residential users.
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.
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.
Well, I'm over thirty, so I do remember metered connections and life without a smartphone. The shared computer reason explains it completely, thanks :)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I just used to read books before I had mobile data. Never thought of printing out a discussion forum and don't remember anyone else doing so, that's why I was curious.
Sometimes people would post stuff that would be handy to have while away from the computer. In the late 90s, when Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was taking off, you could find black belts sharing advice on discussion boards (often very detailed). I would print it and take it to practice.
Damn really?? I have stacks and stacks of discussions from forums and various tutorials I printed off while at school to read later on at home. Everything from bind9 configuration to gun building.. On occasion I still pull some out to review.
I used to print stuff out at school and take it home all the time. I fondly remember printing off guitar tabs, cheat codes, forum threads about computer troubles I was having etc (yes, I had a computer with no internet connection).
Imagine you have to print out map directions before you leave your house so you can reach your destination. Map quest and later google maps worked like this. Otherwise you would have to read a map while driving and even pull over.
And sometimes stop at a gas station to ask for directions. One of the memes that probably makes near zero sense to a young person today is a woman annoyed because the guy driving the car refuses to stop and ask how to get somewhere.
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.