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by mindcrime 891 days ago
> 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.
1 comments
ghaff 890 days ago
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.
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mindcrime 890 days ago
> 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.

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ghaff 890 days ago
I’m a 30+ minute roundtrip by car to retrive something printed which I do semi-regularly for recipes, travel/event info, and just important info I want to file. I have plenty of room and B&W laser printers are cheap.

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.

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mindcrime 890 days ago
Makes sense. For me, I can literally walk to the nearest UPS Store, and the nearest Fedex Store is 10 minutes away by car and ~30 minutes by bicycle. And since I print so infrequently, I can get by without having a printer at home at all.

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.

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