early 90s paper may have been cheaper than digital storage I think?

depends, if its a printer with port 9100 open, or a system that forwards traffic to that, then it will chunk it ontop paper.

this scenario still happens today.

It may seem that the admins were wrong to criticize the fingerer for the voluminous output, but if you think about it, paper logging was a very pragmatic security and auditing measure in those days.

We had a lot of printers around the labs in our university, and they were high-speed, high-capacity. And in the earliest days of multi-user and time-sharing, the hardcopy terminal was actually the default, where the fabled "glass terminal" came along later!

So you have a highly secure system and it's outputting important log entries that may need to be examined later, in the case of a malfunction or a compromise attempt. So you send the most important output to your printer, and you get an offline, immutable audit trail to back up your most important log files.

That seems like a very routine and pragmatic step. In the intervening decades, there were many logging strategies, and many of them admitted for "covering your tracks" by hackers who could erase logs and destroy evidence if the admins weren't careful.

But again, if a 2-minute "finger" interval was causing a paper log overflow, the admins could have mitigated that, but perhaps they were justified in telling the kid to knock off the frivolous resource usage.

However, as I worked for an ISP back in those days as well, I can tell you that log overflows were crazy-making. We had a particular system that acted as primary DNS for many customers. And many customers who were brand-new to the Internet and brand-new to this DNS thing were not real good at configuring it according to standards. And so we had a NOC with projection monitors that monitored system status in various ways, and one of them was tailing our syslog file.

And all day long I kept seeing DNS errors. "Lame delegation" was the winner overall, but there were so many. I was so young and had no privileges or knowledge to fix them. But I helplessly watched them scroll, knowing there were issues, slowdowns, and inefficiences that I couldn't solve for them. Sorry guys.