[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.