>Anyway, that's not the hack. The hack comes from the fact that they
>only had dial-up that was local to Orono, and I wasn't able to move
>there from West Podunk until August.

The other important note for the sake of the Kids These Days is that back then, there was this concept called the "long-distance call", where you actually had to pay by the minute to make a phone call to a number outside your immediate local area. (And those local areas tended to be seriously local, as in not much more than a single town.)