(This is a story about technology. Sort of.)

Many bicyclists with a GPS bike computer probably have it primarily to record their bike rides and then upload them to places like Strava. I'm a bit unusual in that while I do record my rides and make some of them public , and I've come to value this, it's not my primary reason to have a GPS bike computer. Instead, my primary reason is following pre-made routes.

When I started with my recreational bike club , it was well before the era of GPS bike computers. How you followed (or lead) our routes back then was through printed cue sheets , which had all of the turns and so on listed in order, often with additional notes. One of the duties of the leader of the ride was printing out a sufficient number of cue sheets in advance and distributing them to interested parties before the start of the ride. If you were seriously into using cue sheets, you'd use a cue sheet holder (nowadays you can only find these as 'map holders', which is basically the same job); otherwise you might clip the cue sheet to a handlebar brake or gear cable or fold it up and stick it in a back jersey pocket.

Printed cue sheets have a number of nice features, such as giving you a lot of information at a glance. One of them is that a well done cue sheet was and is a lot more than just a list of all of the turns and other things worthy of note; it's an organized, well formatted list of these. The cues would be broken up into sensibly chosen sections, with whitespace between them to make it easier to narrow in on the current one, and you'd lay out the page (or pages) so that the cue or section breaks happened at convenient spots to flip the cue sheet around in cue holders or clips. You'd emphasize important turns, cautions, or other things in various ways. And so on. Some cue sheets even had a map of the route printed on the back.

(You needed to periodically flip the cue sheet around and refold it because many routes had too many turns and other cues to fit in a small amount of printed space, especially if you wanted to use a decently large font size for easy readability.)

Starting in the early 2010s, more and more TBN people started using GPS bike computers or smartphones ( cf ). People began converting our cue sheet routes to computerized GPS routes, with TBN eventually getting official GPS routes . Over time, more and more members got smartphones and GPS units and there was more and more interest in GPS routes and less and less interest in cue sheets. In 2015 I saw the writing on the wall for cue sheets and the club more or less deprecated them, so in August 2016 I gave in and got a GPS unit (which drove me to finally get a smartphone , because my GPS unit assumed you had one ). Cue sheet first routes lingered on for some years afterward, but they're all gone by now; everything is GPS route first.

You can still get cue sheets for club routes (the club's GPS routes typically have turn cues and you can export these into something you can print). But what we don't really have any more is the old school kind of well done, organized cue sheets, and it's basically been a decade since ride leaders would turn up with any printed cue sheets at all. These days it's on you to print your own cue sheet if you need it, and also on you to make a good cue sheet from the basic cue sheet (if you care enough to do so). There are some people who still use cue sheets, but they're a decreasing minority and they probably already had the cue sheet holders and so on (which are now increasingly hard to find). A new rider who wanted to use cue sheets would have an uphill struggle and they might never understand why long time members could be so fond of them.

Cue sheets are still a viable option for route following (and they haven't fundamentally changed). They're just not very well supported any more in TBN because they stopped being popular. If you insist on sticking with them, you still can, but it's not going to be a great experience. I didn't move to a GPS unit because I couldn't possibly use cue sheets any more (I still have my cue sheet holder); I moved because I could see the writing on the wall about which one would be the more convenient, more usable option.

Applications to the (computing) technologies of your choice are left as an exercise for the reader.

PS: As a whole I think GPS bike computers are mostly superior to cue sheets for route following, but that's a different discussion (and it depends on what sort of bicycling you're doing). There are points on both sides.