31–40 of 112 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A quick google search reveals that laptops and smartphones didnt exist back then.
What does that have to do with anything? Disk drives did exist.
A question from someone a bit younger: What was the purpose of printing out online discussions? Was it to read them while not at the computer? Was it to physically archive them?
Sometimes I'd also bring it along as reading material in a car ride etc...
There were also some games that didn't cope well with switching between fullscreen and desktop, so printed material helped there too!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does that have to do with anything? Disk drives did exist.
> Disk drives did exist. They did, but FWIW, they were very small and fairly expensive compared to contemporary times. The attitude towards using disk space was a bit different back then, because it was a much scarcer and more valuable resource.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took time to access the information. You had to turn on your modem and connect to the internet (took a while). Then you had to load up the information (took a while). Then there was the lack of good search engines, so you were worried you'd never find the information again. And most importantly, you couldn't pull up this information while out and about (there was no 3g/4g/5g).
Ok, but why print it out instead of saving it locally? (Other than to read it on the go? Did people do that?)
Doing a lot of reading on that was rough on the eyes and you were scrolling constantly. I printed a lot back then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took time to access the information. You had to turn on your modem and connect to the internet (took a while). Then you had to load up the information (took a while). Then there was the lack of good search engines, so you were worried you'd never find the information again. And most importantly, you couldn't pull up this information while out and about (there was no 3g/4g/5g).
Ok, but why print it out instead of saving it locally? (Other than to read it on the go? Did people do that?)
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took time to access the information. You had to turn on your modem and connect to the internet (took a while). Then you had to load up the information (took a while). Then there was the lack of good search engines, so you were worried you'd never find the information again. And most importantly, you couldn't pull up this information while out and about (there was no 3g/4g/5g).
Ok, but why print it out instead of saving it locally? (Other than to read it on the go? Did people do that?)
A question from someone a bit younger: What was the purpose of printing out online discussions? Was it to read them while not at the computer? Was it to physically archive them?
It took time to access the information. You had to turn on your modem and connect to the internet (took a while). Then you had to load up the information (took a while). Then there was the lack of good search engines, so you were worried you'd never find the information again. And most importantly, you couldn't pull up this information while out and about (there was no 3g/4g/5g).
Today is garbage. Best to use site search on individual known websites.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took time to access the information. You had to turn on your modem and connect to the internet (took a while). Then you had to load up the information (took a while). Then there was the lack of good search engines, so you were worried you'd never find the information again. And most importantly, you couldn't pull up this information while out and about (there was no 3g/4g/5g).
Ok, but why print it out instead of saving it locally? (Other than to read it on the go? Did people do that?)
Heck, even if you could save it locally, you might have only had a 500MB hard drive, it seems weird now because with TB drives, unless you are saving games/media, you have almost unlimited storage.