[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.