[StephenSmith]

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).

[njroute22]

"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.

[yreg]

Ok, but why print it out instead of saving it locally? (Other than to read it on the go? Did people do that?)

[Snoddas]

Not OP, but I used to do this regularly in the early '90s.

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

[icehawk]

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.

[mikewarot]

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.

It was well written, and had no spam in it.

[cbondurant]

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.

[ghaff]

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.

[billyjmc]

Check your math – the King James Bible in uncompressed plain text UTF-8 is 4.4 MB. A floppy fits waaaay more than 20 printed pages of text.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10

[bombcar]

Use the internet archive to look at computer ads from the 80s-90s.

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.

[ksherlock]

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.

[bluedino]

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.

[yreg]

> you might have only had a 500MB hard drive

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.

[giantrobot]

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.

[_jal]

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.

[gumballindie]

A quick google search reveals that laptops and smartphones didnt exist back then.

[ziddoap]

?

Saving locally to a desktop computer surely existed back then, I even did it myself sometimes.

[Aardwolf]

But then you have to be seated at that desktop computer to read it

[ziddoap]

Indeed.

I was just pointing out that saving locally (the original question) has nothing to do with googling about laptops and smartphones (the condescending reply).

[yreg]

What does that have to do with anything? Disk drives did exist.

[MandieD]

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.

[gumballindie]

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.

[yreg]

> for instance around 300-500 MB

I mean, that's more than enough for text downloaded from a usenet group. Printing that much plaintext out would be something.

[mindcrime]

> Disk drives did exist.

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.

[ghaff]

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.

[mindcrime]

> Furthermore, there was probably more of a reflexive printing things out at that point which took a long time to break.

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.

[doberst0103]

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.

[I_Am_Nous]

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.