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Comment by jakejake | Hacker News Reader

Really interesting story. I wonder if I myself might have gotten into trouble were it not for the fact that I couldn't make that many phone calls. I seem to recall that there was no such thing as unlimited calling - even for local numbers. Not to mention I wasn't allowed to hog our one phone line. Calling a long-distance number for 30 minutes probably would have resulted in at least a $10 phone bill - which was totally out of the question.

I was resigned to call one local BBS and do a direct 1-to-1 modem connection with my only other friend who had a modem!

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Local calls were unlimited in the 1970s and 1980s, like the are now. I think that this was true everywhere in the US but with different RBOCs perhaps some had different rules.

Guy I went to college with in the late 1990s had measured phone service [0] at home in Illinois. It's still alive today [1] and it's the cheapest way to get a phone line, with the caveat that substantial usage can become pretty expensive.

[0] https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4986/measured-telephon...

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/17/business/la-fi-lazar...

Yeah, but there was the concept of intraLATA toll calls. Or "local-toll" calls. These weren't long-distance, but they weren't free, either.

I remember calling my grandparents in Arizona cost 5¢ a minute, but calling relatives in the next city over—about 10 miles away—cost something crazy like 29¢ a minute.

This was in California. I'm sure the rate structures varied from state to state.

That's how I remember it too. Most local calls perhaps were included with the service, but a call to the other side of town might be considered long-distance. I do remember that the rates varied wildly. My parents would occasionally question me or my sister about a specific call on the bill that cost a lot.

When cellphones were still pretty new, they offered unlimited call forwarding we would set the phone to call forward to the bbs we want to call then call the cellphone number. It was great until the cellphone companies caught on and limited the call forwarding minutes.

I'm impressed that the modulated audio from the sending modem was intelligible by the receiving modem when it emerged out the other end of the cell network!

Forwarded calls all went over land-line connections, so it all turned out good.

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