>>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.)

Oh, yeah, I suppose anyone who's too young to have experienced the joy of dial-up Internet isn't likely to remember toll calls either. Technically this concept still exists—a commonly seen vestige in the US is all those numbers in area codes 800, 866, et al., which are still called "toll-free numbers" even though only people with very basic land line service still incur toll charges on non-local calls these days.

(I do on my land line, but it doesn't matter in practice, since I use my mobile phone for pretty much all my outgoing calls except the occasional fax to an insurance company or other organization for which it is still 1985.)

When I was a kid this was still a very big deal; long-distance calls from, for instance, where I lived to my grandparents' place up north cost something like 10¢ a minute during peak (for which read: standard business) hours when I was little, which added up mighty fast. The cost of gasoline being what it was back then, it often felt like it would be cheaper to just drive two hours and see them rather than call. There was even a PSA that the phone company ran on TV for many years, with a catchy jingle informing subscribers that "Five [n.b. as in "o'clock PM"] is when the rates go down!"

Even at the lower rates, it was possible to rack up astonishing phone bills with interstate long-distance calls well into the '90s. I... may have incurred a $300 one, one month, when I was at UMaine for the first time in 1994 and was sort-of-LDRing-or-something a girl who was going to Tufts. ($300 was a terrifying amount of money to me in 1994. That bill might have had a direct bearing on my decision to drop out of school... again... and take the first of the semi-random tech jobs I had through the rest of the '90s.)

These things leave deep scars. My father is still in the habit of ending phone calls as quickly as possible, even though we both have had smartphones with unlimited calling plans for years.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.