Finding Papers Before the Web

Inspired by Daniel Litt's X Post

Started asking mathematicians whose career started before the internet if they think Google, email, etc. have sped up the pace of math research. Wide variety of opinions but the broad consensus seems to be “yes,” among those I’ve spoken to.

— Daniel Litt (@littmath) October 30, 2025

and Bill's recent post on finding papers on the web I would tell the story of the before times.

In the 1980s if you wanted to read a paper, you either had to find it in a journal or conference proceedings or have it mailed to you. You could reach out to an author or SIGACT News would publish a list of tech reports from various universities. Departments would keep a master copy of each paper. You would send a stamped self-addressed envelope to the department which would copy the paper, put on a tech-report cover and send it back to you.

If you had a particularly exciting result, you would share it by physically mailing it out to your colleagues. I found out about the latest circuit results from Håstad and Razborov, as they sent papers to my advisor Michael Sipser, often hand-written and in Razborov's case in Russian. Neil Immerman sent a copy of his nondeterministic space closed under complement paper to Sipser but he was away for the summer. I found out about the result from a Berkeley talk announcement. 

Email wasn't a common method of communication until the mid-80's and it wasn't until a few years after that that people figured out how to send papers by putting the latex or postscript text directly in the email. This was before attachments and PDFs. Old mail systems put a ">" before From so it wouldn't be confused as a header and LaTeX rendered ">From" as "¿From" which you'd often see in conference papers from around that time.

In my first year as an assistant professor in 1989-90, there was a flurry of emailed papers marking (and causing) the quick progress we had in interactive proofs, described so well by László Babai's E-mail and the Unexpected Power of Interaction. Babai had a warning about researchers disadvantaged because they weren't receiving these emails.

I got tired of emailing papers so as soon as the web became a thing in 1993, I put all my papers online and have maintained it since. Now with sites like arXiv and ECCC, everyone has access to the latest and greatest in complexity.

Now how long before the next generation asks how we discovered papers before we had chatbots to find them for us?