Because on a dialup line you can have the system reading them
to your harddrive and not wait for anything yourself when you want
to look at the next or any other message or thread. Since they are
all text they don't use much space. The big ones just don't get
brought in and are never seen.

"JE McGimpsey" wrote in message news:jemcgimpsey-
Sorry, that's just weird. Why would anyone want to take up hard-drive
space by downloading newsgroup messages at all (unless one's going to
work off-line)?