In article ,
"David McRitchie" wrote:

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.

Fair enough - though when I was on a dial-up, I still used a newsreader
that only brought down the threads I wanted, and didn't see any
significant delay other than the first message. Different strokes...