Printers slow things down and thus eat up connect time. During your search you may want to dump a screen to the printer for easy reference. So leave it on and enabled, but don’t toggle the printer echo on from within your communications program.
Floppy disks are cheap and erasable, however, so it definitely makes good sense to capture your entire online session. Open your capture buffer or set your communications program to dump to disk or do whatever else is necessary to put the machine in “record” mode. You can always go back into the file and delete the portions you don’t want with a word processor. In addition, a record of a complete online session can be a wonderful self-teaching tool, since you can review it to see where you went wrong, the number of hits on a term that you did not follow up on, etc. If you have a hard disk, tell your system to capture to it, since less time is required to write to a hard disk than to a floppy.
