Way back in the '70's when I started playing we used standard notebook paper for the most part, but it wasn't all that long before we wound up using a print copy of a character sheet that someone on the yearbook staff had done up at school. It had a couple of photos on it that someone had taken of the group, had nice straight lines for the equipment chart, a clean typeface, and used both the front and back. They had it printed up on this yellow-ish paper and gathered into gummed pads that you could just tear off a new character sheet when you needed one. But we still used a lot of notebook paper for character sheets too.
Those original sheets got revised once dropping the photos and using the space a little better for being able to keep information on only one side. These were originally on a more orange-ish color paper and look to have been simply done on a quality typewriter rather than a paste-up. They got copied once onto pads of green paper but were otherwise unchanged. But eventually these ran out too and that's when I took over.
Even before I started DMing I had begun using alternatively a typewriter or my computers to create new and better character sheets for my own use. When the green ones ran low people began asking for mine and I eventually would just bring an additional folder to the game that always had a bunch of my latest blank sheets for others to use. I actually started to get into it a bit, working and re-working the arrangment of information, considering the information that we wanted to record versus what actually got used most in the game, and how difficult it seemed to be to find it quickly. Almost a small offshoot hobby in itself. I created the character sheets for our group from when we were still playing 1E all the way through the end of all our 2E campaigns in the late '90's and had done any number of different versions of it. I did character sheets for Star Wars (d6) and other RPGs that we played too.
Then 3E came along and that all changed. At first we used the character sheets from the 'ol Character Generator software. We HATED the slow printing speed (especially for all those pages for spellcasters!)and disliked the fairly clunky organization of it, but we all actually liked the look. Unfortunately it became obsolete because of new rules additions and the improved usefulness of PCGen.
We immediately graduated to using PCGen for both maintaining our characters and printing character sheets and that lasted at least a couple years. I disliked the use of java but for the most part it at least WORKED with all the new rules. But when it became necessary to start paying to incorporate new rules we dropped it like a hot potato, and though we miss it sometimes we've never gone back to it. My interests simply did not lie with working with databases and such to get it to do what we wanted/needed, and using either PCGen or Etools felt FAR too cumbersome. Rather than simply being a tool to create and maintain PC's the software itself seemed to demand inordinate amounts of attention. Besides, I found that it had become a highly undesirable CRUTCH.
By having PCGen handle all the calculations and moving all the levelling-up procedure into the background the players DIDN'T KNOW HOW to create a 1st level character anymore, much less level up existing characters. The first time they started making characters without software helping to tell them what to do they were LOST. I had assumed they knew what to do but they had never NEEDED to before then so they hadn't bothered! They didn't know how many skill points they should have, how many feats, etc., because all those calculations had been done FOR them starting with their very first 3E characters and they were flustered just by having to LOOK for the answer!
At that point we were back to blank sheets and pen rather than software-controlled PC monitoring. I made a few aborted attempts to make new sheets as I had done in the old days but with the software I had available to me and my limited skills at using it, I was spending more time on it than I cared to and not satisfied with the results. As part of that process I started looking at other peoples character sheets thinking to use one as a basis to work from, but instead decided that other people were doing very good work with character sheets as it was. I didn't want to waste time reinventing the wheel so I settled on Mad Irishman's sheets (especially the old-school styles) to supply to those players who didn't go and get their own.
One thing - even though I've purchased "Official" character sheets (and even used them a few times!) for the most part I have not wanted or needed them in 30 years of gaming. Same goes for most of my players - they almost never bought much less used "Official" sheets. You could probably count on one hand the number of individual characters who were put onto Official sheets in over 30 years of gaming.
