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Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

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Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#71

Post by ghaff »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #59
ghaff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used scancafe a number of times and actually wrote an early-on review for CNET. One general piece of advice is that before you go crazy, think about what you really care about saving. There’s a cost to scanning of course. There’s also a cost to metadata and other cataloging so that you can actually find what you’ve scanned. For photos everything is in Lightroom with at least a modicum of organization. When my da…

This is a good point. For my use cases, I get a bulk rate, and dump everything into digital storage and a processing workflow. Once digital, it's a future problem, but at least it'll be preserved on disk and tape somewhere. Apple didn't have machine vision in photos when I started doing this, for example, so I lean heavily on Moore's Law (very broadly speaking about tech acceleration) that future tech will solve (fac…

It’s certainly use case specific. In my case, less is more. A fairly heavily-curated collection of photos is more valuable to me than a data dump that may preserve some diamond in the rough that future tech may do something interesting with.

Photos of a historically interesting event? Sure. But for old family pics I’m happy to have hundreds of curated photos of mostly people and call it a day.

Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#73

Post by j45 »

yreg wrote: post #12

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?

During those years there was no high speed internet for most residential users.

Typically an internet user would dial out with their physical phone line which was often also their home phone line (no mobile data).

A lot of internet service providers back then charged by the minute or hour to connect.

Collecting posts could let you collect more to read them offline.

Printing in general was more common (easy way to share with ppl who weren’t online) and a better reading experience than reading them on screen because the screen resolutions were still pretty low.

Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#74

Post by mikewarot »

yreg wrote: post #15
StephenSmith wrote: post #14

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?)

We had tiny low resolution CRT displays back then, 640*480 pixels, 9" or so. 8*8 pixel fonts suck.

We were all used to reading text on paper in a much nicer format back then.

The typical text/graphic display of the day was about 36" * 24" and delivered daily on your doorstep for about $0.50 plus tip.

Printout wasn't as nice, but you could mark it up, and scroll was intuitive, as was copy and paste.

They are overpriced, but try reading a newspaper once... It's a completely different experience. You have no idea how nice it felt to have the Sunday newspaper and time to soak it in.

It was well written, and had no spam in it.

Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#76

Post by mindcrime »

ghaff wrote: post #68
mindcrime wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Furthermore, there was probably more of a reflexive printing things out at that point which took a long time to break. Absolutely. Back in that era printing things was just "what you did" if you wanted some combination of permanent / portable / offline accessible. FSM only knows how many trees I am responsible for killing back in the day, printing stuff that I would never bother printing now. But over time we got m…

I’m a 30+ minute roundtrip by car to retrive something printed which I do semi-regularly for recipes, travel/event info, and just important info I want to file. I have plenty of room and B&W laser printers are cheap. I DID give up on quality inkjet photo printers. That I’ll just send out to some online printer. Which I rarely do; I only have so much wall space.

Makes sense. For me, I can literally walk to the nearest UPS Store, and the nearest Fedex Store is 10 minutes away by car and ~30 minutes by bicycle. And since I print so infrequently, I can get by without having a printer at home at all.

But yeah, for people who are much further away from a printing location or who print more frequently, it would definitely still make sense to have a home printer.

Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#79

Post by k1t »

jeroenhd wrote: post #53
jdriselvato wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#80

Post by ogurechny »

yreg wrote: post #12

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?

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.

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