[ogurechny]

To generalize, systems (and local networks) were not constantly connected. Even “internet-connected” could mean just the ability to exchange data when requested by user or at regular intervals with some other system, maybe even only over certain protocols (like mail), instead of “always online”.

Imagine the pyramid: the amount of time user was interactively connected to some network service — the amount of time user was in front of (any) computer system — the rest of life activities.

Fully featured mail clients, news clients, FidoNet clients had many options to quickly mark message chains for download or export, and deal with them offline later. You could even dump all those updates to a floppy, give it to a modem-less user, then transfer replies for upload through the same “floppynet”. Communities also collected all kinds of FAQs for users to grab first and study offline before wasting time.

Similar solutions were needed for periods spent away from keyboard. If you were on a trip in a different city, you would have all the directions printed or simply written down instead of taking the computer with you.

Some documents were simply more usable when printed than when displayed screen-by-screen in text mode or low resolution. Some services/protocols did not implement live text search, and a glance at paper copy could be easier and faster. Later example of server-side state updates over slow channel is the existence of dedicated normal and print modes in old forum software. By default, a small number of messages is shown on each page to prevent long wait times for each page on dial-up. People who are sure they want to save or print the whole thread can choose much longer page that lacks online-oriented design features.