[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.