Everyone grumbles about paying for a single scientific article. But you used to not be able to do that. Articles were bundled in journals, and if you wanted to read an article, you typically needed to find the entire journal issue. Your options to do that were limited.
You could subscribe to a journal in your field. Maybe. Journals superficially look like magazines, but they were rarely priced like magazines. Journals had small print runs, so the economics of printing journals were very different than printing magazines. So a year’s subscription for a journal would not run tens of dollars, but could be thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars for a year. ( The Journal of Comparative Neurology was famously expensive . And continues to be, last I looked.) If an articl
That left either interlibrary loans or sending postcards to authors asking for reprints. Both were time consuming. It could take weeks to get a reply, if you got one at all. It didn’t always yield results.