> 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.

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 more comfortable with not needing everything on paper, and so now...

> It still boggles my mind a bit when people say they don’t have a printer at home

... I am one of those people. I don't own a printer and rarely print anything. On the infrequent occasions when I do want paper copy of something, I just send it to a nearby Fedex Store or UPS Store and have it printed there.

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.

They did but were rather small and unreliable - for instance around 300-500 MB and could easily die. People printed stuff for the same reason books exist - storage and mobility, neither of which were easily available. I used to print source code just to review in silence. Might print backup emails to ensure durability.

> for instance around 300-500 MB

I mean, that's more than enough for text downloaded from a usenet group. Printing that much plaintext out would be something.

Which were connected to the very expensive machine that a whole household shared.

In mid-late 90s central Texas, a well-off family might have had one PC and a second phone line shared between Internet access and the kids, as well as a dot matrix printer or even an inkjet (ink was a LOT cheaper back then), but only the most indulged (or nerdy, spending their savings on that instead of driving expenses) kids would have had their own PCs.

There was also no one way to store information. Some people still had floppy disks, then the smaller hard disks, then CD ROM -- it was all over the place.