[wongarsu]

Also in the pre-broadband era internet was commonly charged by the minute. Printing stuff out allowed you to read it in your own time without a ticking clock.

Of course you could save pages, or even print to PDF (after installing ghostscript). But that's nowhere near as comfortable to read

[ghaff]

There was software for various different types of forums that was specifically designed to go online, download anything new, upload anything you composed online, and log off. Even if you weren’t getting charged by the minute by the BBS, you might have been getting charged $1 per minute by the phone company.

[alex_c]

I felt like the PDF format must’ve been newer than the old dialup times, but it was released in 1993… TIL!