You generally had no choice about it. For example, Dartmouth Time Sharing supported the Teletype ASR-33[1], which ran at 10 characters per second. So if you wer

You generally had no choice about it. For example, Dartmouth Time Sharing supported the Teletype ASR-33[1], which ran at 10 characters per second. So if you were printing a moderately long program you would need to wait 5 minutes or more. Also the density of the tape wasn't very high (I'm guessing less than 10 characters per inch). Which means that 5 minutes of printing amounted to 300 inches, or 25 feet. It wasn't really a problem, because the paper tape naturally curled up. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33