[NoZebra120vClip]

I sort of regard these commenters as crazy. I never had the habit of printing stuff off so I could read it later. I read it online, or not at all. And by "online" I mean from computer storage on the screen, not necessarily over a modem connection or something.

The fundamental disconnect you guys have is this: in order to print something out, it needs to be stored somewhere first. So you indeed downloaded a text file in order to print it. Surely you saved it somewhere, at least in RAM if not permanent storage. Otherwise the printout wouldn't happen.

The sorts of things that I used the printer for were school reports and papers, and especially Print Shop style banners. It was really fun to run off a larger-than-life "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" sign that was basically professional DTP style with good fonts, graphics and the whole bit.

At school the chief use of the Line Printers was for large-format ASCII art. We'd take some GIFS of rather prurient pin-up shots, or anime or just some interesting subject, and run it through an ASCII art generator, then print out something suitable for covering an entire wall. Sometimes we'd even print out the Pascal code we were working on, so we could mark it up and sort of edit it offline. But that was the exception to prove the rule.

[obmelvin]

Given the years (91-94), it seems likely these were printed out a long time ago and have sat in filing boxes for nearly 30 years. Looking back it may seem crazy to print so many things out, but screen quality and norms have changed a lot since then!

To this day, many academics still print tons of papers out to read. I'm sure there are other niches where it is still considered normal to print - even though sure, you could argue that an iPad Pro + Pencil is advantageous if for no other reason than physical space.

edit: Could've made my point a bit better. I get where you are coming from. I just mean that at the time, I think more people would find it crazy to stock pile CDs with text files vs printouts