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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?
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?
Imagine you have to print out map directions before you leave your house so you can reach your destination. Map quest and later google maps worked like this. Otherwise you would have to read a map while driving and even pull over.
You can scan and OCR (adobe) this yourself with not much more effort than boxing and shipping at FedEx Then repost on related public-facing online forums or a free wordpress site or upload to archive.org
I get this answer a lot when I ask similar question but how do we scan it? Taking a Photos of every print out from our Phone? That is 1000s of photos each needing to snap and focus. Not everyone has a scanner, and not every scanner has automated tray feed. And even if they do the quality of their scan are really low by default. I have similar question with Business Cards as well. I have hundreds if not thousands of t…
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…
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
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…
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
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. I certainly downloaded BBS and Usenet forums to read offline on my computer but a lot of us printed a lot of stuff out on a daily basis. It still boggles my mind a bit when people say they don’t have a printer at home because there’s a lot of info like trip itineraries I want in hardcopy.
> 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 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.
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?
Primarily to read them offline. These messages were usually part of usenet, or in emails lists, or held on (remote) servces like Mono at Imperial. You could read them on the HP-UX systems, via a dumb terminal, which were connected to the Internet, but not connected to a PC with a disk drive. (Well, there were a few PCs and Mac classics around, but not enough for everyone and - as an Amiga fan - there wasn't yet CrossDos to let me use compatible disks.)
Some items, like early drafts of the Star Wars scripts, I did print for archival purposes as I (foolishly) thought that they'd be spotted and taken down by the copyright police, and lost forever!
Spoiler alert: This was all around 1991
Hey there, I do some work with the Archive folks as an ad hoc physical archive volunteer. I'll pay for you to ship them and facilitate getting them ingested into items and a collection if you'd like. Let me know how to get in touch. Once scanned, derive operations will take care of OCR and generating relevant metadata from the artifacts. If there are any issues (copyright, etc) preventing these items from being publi…
FWIW, on most other systems I'm contactable via @marquisdegeek