They vary from Billboard charts, to Associated Press reports on Michael Jackson's wealth, and Debbie Gibson discussion groups!
Are they useful/interesting as pieces of Internet history?
Are the copyright/privacy issues too onerous to scan/publish?
Do I simply send a box of paper to archive.org to worry about?
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 public, they'll be made private by patron services.
(no affiliation with the Archive, just a volunteer)
Dear Google, you could have added ads to those old results to justify keeping them up, but you failed because you're more interested in locking things down than actually building up an open web.
Now there's decades worth of old usenet content probably gone, my understanding is a lot of it was donated by old usenet providers that shut down or just couldnt keep hosting really old but historic texts for whatever reason.
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?
That's what I would do, although I'd probably scan it for them, or at least would send an email first. Also, good on you for trying to preserve early internet history. You have my admiration.
Then repost on related public-facing online forums or a free wordpress site or upload to archive.org
The fundamental disconnect you guys have is this: in order to print something out, it needs to be stored somewhere first. So you indeed downloaded a text file in order to print it. Surely you saved it somewhere, at least in RAM if not permanent storage. Otherwise the printout wouldn't happen.
The sorts of things that I used the printer for were school reports and papers, and especially Print Shop style banners. It was really fun to run off a larger-than-life "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" sign that was basically professional DTP style with good fonts, graphics and the whole bit.
At school the chief use of the Line Printers was for large-format ASCII art. We'd take some GIFS of rather prurient pin-up shots, or anime or just some interesting subject, and run it through an ASCII art generator, then print out something suitable for covering an entire wall. Sometimes we'd even print out the Pascal code we were working on, so we could mark it up and sort of edit it offline. But that was the exception to prove the rule.
A lot of them are on waybackmachine, but finding out about them is often the hard part.
I created a chan discussion board on my own imageboard (http://13channel.crabdance.com/chan/index.html) to research this kind of stuff - but only for chans specifically.
Either use an all in one printer or scanner with an automatic document feeder, or send that box to a service to scan.
Once digitized there are a lot more places interested in it
well, not quite. soon.
models gotta feed.