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cbondurant 3y ago

I do wonder about the relative cost of paper to digital storage mediums of the time. It could be that would have something to do with it. Take for example the fact that (testing with a 150kb block of lorem ipsum text) you could easily squeeze the text capacity of a 3.5mm floppy into around 20 pages of physical text. 10 sheets of double-side printed paper and some ink might well have been cheaper than the floppy it would be intended to replace. Unfortunately I was unable to find any good resources on the cost-per-page of printing back in the day. So I can't really put hard numbers to this. Printing is incredibly cheap now (for text at least, printing photos uses so much ink) and I can't imagine it was all that more expensive back when most work people did still relied on printing off documents and hand signing them. (physical bill printing, checks, physical contract signing, etc.) Of course this is all speculation on my part, I was too young to care about money and how much things cost back when the my household had floppy disks and printed things off regularly. If someone has a better memory of the time I would really be interested to hear from someone who did pay attention to those things.

ghaff 3y ago
Printing was mostly about the cost of paper (and the amortized cost of the printer). Dot matrix ribbons were very cheap. Without deeply diving into them vs. now printer costs I’m guessing that dot matrix then vs. B&W laser now were similar in inflation-adjusted dollars and inkjets today probably actually cost more.
bombcar 3y ago
Use the internet archive to look at computer ads from the 80s-90s. Early laser printers were very expensive for the printer but the toner was relatively cheap, and a ream of paper wasn't that expensive, either.
billyjmc 3y ago
Check your math – the King James Bible in uncompressed plain text UTF-8 is 4.4 MB. A floppy fits waaaay more than 20 printed pages of text. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10

jdriselvato 3y ago

You have to remember that there was a time when phone lines and internet connections shared resources. Also, the internet wasn't nearly as fast as it is now, even a decade ago, so printing meant you had that copy locally without needing to wait for load times. I have a couple of GameFAQs discussions and cheat lists for various PS2/GameCube games from the early 2000s. They're stowed in a folder because it was a hassle to run between the family room and my bedroom when referencing. Also, for the longest time, a household shared a single computer. So printing off the pages meant I didn't need to compete between family members for computer use. Edit: A friend just reminded me of navigating in the passenger seat with a stack of Mapquest prints. Edit-2: If anyone wants to relive this in the modern world, print to PDF blog posts, news articles, etc., and store them on your Kindle (or equivalent). You'll notice you'll comprehend the article way better than on your phone or laptop.

wongarsu 3y ago
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
- alex_c 3y ago
  I felt like the PDF format must’ve been newer than the old dialup times, but it was released in 1993… TIL!
- ghaff 3y ago
  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.
jeroenhd 3y ago
I too had printed copies of web pages (mostly cheats and guides for games that you simply couldn't access while a game was running!) but if I were to print out entire forum discussions, my parents would've killed me for using so much precious printer ink (and paper, probably). So while I understand the need for printing out stuff back then, I'm a bit puzzled why someone would print out forum discussions per se.
- k1t 3y ago
  If you don't have internet access at home, then you have limited options. You could save them to disk and hope they display OK at home. But this forces you to sit at the computer to read them, and assumes you actually have a computer at home. Alternatively, you could print them out.
- jdriselvato 3y ago
  Back in the day a lot of video games had lore that was either made up or told telephone style. There wasn't exactly wikis on a lot of information to tell truth from fact. So printing out the discussion allowed you to learn how to accomplish certain things or unlock certain items doing weird gamepad movement, even if it was false. See Mew in Pokemon Y/B/R and the SS Anne truck: https://gaming-urban-legends.fandom.com/wiki/Mew_Under_the_Truck https://gaming-urban-legends.fandom.com/wiki/Mew_Under_the_T... All you need is some troll posting how it worked for them, and you'd print out their instructions along with someone else who said they got it working the same way with a +1 step, and you're printing off the entire discussion, trying to get a Mew before school the next day to no avail. My Dad wasn't going to let me hogging the family computer for hours playing on my gameboy for no reason.
- OJFord 3y ago
  I printed forum threads on OS installation/dual booting/BIOS stuff that I might need not having a phone with web access or another computer. That's quite specific, but just one example. I think we could imagine a scenario where you might have printed any instructional thread. The interview transcriptions mentioned could've been for offline interview prep.